Captain Airhead, Would You Please Go Now?

 Leap Day this year is the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s announcement that during a “walk in the snow” he had decided that he would step down and not lead the Liberal Party into the next Dominion election.  He had been leader of the Grits for sixteen years since Lester Pearson stepped down in April of 1968.   With the exception of the six month premiership of Joe Clark he had been Prime Minister all that time.   His was the third longest premiership in Canadian history.   The longest was that of William Lyon Mackenzie King who had been a different kind of Liberal leader.   King, like Trudeau, had been a traitor to Canada, her history, heritage, and traditions, but in his case it was American-style capitalist liberalism to which he had sold us out.   In the case of Pierre Trudeau it was Soviet and Chinese Communism that was his true master.   Canada’s second longest premiership was also her first that of Sir John A. Macdonald.   Sir John had been the leader of the Fathers of Confederation and never betrayed us.   Nor did Canadians ever grow tired of Old Tomorrow.   Shortly before his death in 1891 he won his sixth majority in that year’s Dominion Election by campaigning for “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader” against a Liberal Party that sought to move us closer economically and culturally into the orbit of the United States.   By contrast by the time Trudeau took his famous walk Canadians had grown absolutely sick and tired of him.   The Liberals were heading to defeat, Trudeau knew it, and in the interest of preserving his legacy and what was left of his reputation jumped off the ship before it sank.

 

The electorate’s having grown sick of Trudeau and his party should be regarded as the expected outcome when a Prime Minister remains in office for a long period of time.   Sir John’s enduring popularity can be taken as the exception explainable by the fact that he was an exceptional statesman, identified with the country he led as no other Prime Minister could ever hope to be due to his central role in her founding, and a personable leader to whom people could relate.   When a Sovereign, like Queen Victoria during whose reign Confederation took place or like our late Queen Elizabeth II of Blessed Memory, has an exceptionally long reign this is cause for celebration and rejoicing.   It is the role of the Sovereign, after all, to embody the principle of continuity and everything that is enduring, lasting, and permanent in the realm.   The man who fills the Prime Minister’s office, by contrast, is very much the man of the moment.   Premierships, therefore, are usually best kept short.

 

Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, has been Prime Minister since 2015 and Canadians are now far sicker of him than they ever were of his father.   Personally, I had had more than enough of him while he was still the third party leader prior to the 2015 Dominion Election.   Why it took this long for the rest of the country to catch up with me I have no idea but here we are.   It is 2024 and Canadians are divided on whether they would like Captain Airhead to follow his father’s footsteps and take a walk in the snow, whether they would like to see him suffer the humiliation of going down in defeat in the next Dominion Election or whether they would like to see him brought down in an act of direct divine intervention involving a lightning bolt that strikes the ground beneath him causing it to open up, swallow him whole, and belch out fire and brimstone.  What unites Canadians is that we all wish that he would make like Dr. Seuss’ Marvin K. Mooney and “please go now.”   Thermidor is rapidly approaching for Captain Airhead and his version of the Liberal Party as it eventually comes for all Jacobins.

 

The Canadian Robespierre seems determined, however, not to go to his inevitable guillotine without one last stab at imposing his ghoulish and clownish version of the Reign of Terror.   On Monday the Liberals tabled, as they have been threatening to do since the last Dominion Election, Bill C-63, an omnibus bill that would enhance government power in the name of combatting “online harms.”   A note to American readers, in the Commonwealth to “table” a bill does not mean to take it off the table, i.e., to suspend or postpone it as in the United States, but rather to put it on the table, i.e., to introduce it.   Defenders of omnibus bills regard them as efficient time-savers.   They are also convenient ways to smuggle in something objectionable that is unlikely to pass if forced to stand on its own merits by rolling it up with something that is desirable and difficult or impossible to oppose without making yourself look bad.   In this case, the Liberals are trying to smuggle in legislation that would allow Canadians to sue other Canadians for up to $20 000, with the possibility of being fined another $50 000 payable to the government thrown in on top of it, over online speech they consider to be hateful and legislation that would make it possible for someone to receive life imprisonment for certain “hate crimes”, by rolling it up in a bill ostensibly about protecting children from online bullying and pornographic exploitation.  As is always the case when the Liberals introduce legislation that has something to do with combatting hate it reads like they interpreted George Orwell’s depiction of Big Brother in 1984 as a “how-to” manual.  

 

Nobody with an IQ that can be expressed with a positive number could possibly be stupid enough to think that this Prime Minister or any of his Cabinet cares about protecting children.   Consider their response to the actions taken over the last year or so by provincial premiers such as New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs and Alberta’s Danielle Smith to do just that, protect children  from perverts in the educational system hell-bent on robbing children of their innocence and filling their heads with sex and smut from the earliest grades.   Captain Airhead and his corrupt cohorts denounced and demonized these premiers’ common-sense, long overdue, efforts, treating them not as the measures taken in defense of children and their parents and families that they were, but as an attack on the alphabet soup gang, one of the many groups that the Liberals and the NDP court in the hopes that these in satisfaction over having their special interests pandered to will overlook the progressive left’s contemptuous disregard for the common good of the whole country and for the interests of those who don’t belong to one or another of their special groups.  

 

Nor could any Canadian capable of putting two and two together and who is even marginally informed about what has been going on in this country in this decade take seriously the Prime Minister’s posturing about hate.    The leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, when asked about what stance the Conservatives would take towards this bill made the observation that Captain Airhead given his own past is the last person who should be dictating to other Canadians about hate.   Poilievre was referring to the blackface scandal that astonishingly failed to end Captain Airhead’s career in 2019.  It would have been more to the point to have referenced the church burnings of 2021.  In the summer of that year, as Captain Airhead hosted conferences on the subjects of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that consisted of a whole lot of crying and hand-wringing and thinking out ways to get around basic rights and freedoms so as to be able to throw in gaol anyone who looks at a Jew or Muslim cross-eyed, Canada was in the midst of the biggest spree of hate crimes in her history.   Christian church buildings all across Canada were targeted for arson and/or other acts of vandalism.  Not only did Captain Airhead fail to treat this violent and criminal display of Christophobia as a serious problem in the same way he was treating these other types of hatred directed towards specific religions he played a significant role in inciting these attacks on Canada’s Christian churches by promoting a narrative in which all allegations against Canada’s churches and her past governors with regards to the Indian Residential Schools are accepted without question or requirement of proof. (1)

 

Clearly Captain Airhead does not give a rat’s rump about hate qua hate.   If hatred is directed towards people he doesn’t like, like Christians, he shrugs it off even when it is expressed through violent, destructive, crime.   If it is directed against people he likes, or, more accurately, against groups to which he panders, he treats it as if it were the most heinous of crimes even if it is expressed merely in words.   While I am on principle opposed to all laws against hate since they are fundamentally unjust and by nature tyrannical (2) they are especially bad when drawn up by someone of Captain Airhead’s ilk.

 

Captain Airhead’s supposed concern about “online harms” is also a joke.   Consider how he handles real world harms.   His approach to the escalating problem of substance abuse is one that seeks to minimize the harm drug abusers do to themselves by providing them with a “safe” supply of their poison paid for by the government.   This approach is called “harms reduction” even though when it comes to the harms that others suffer from drug abuse such as being violently attacked by someone one doesn’t know from Adam because in his drug-induced mania he thinks his victim is a zombie space alien seeking to eat his brain and lay an egg in the cavity, this approach should be called “harms facilitation and enablement.”   Mercifully, there is only so much Captain Airhead can do to promote this folly at the Dominion level and so it is only provinces with NDP governments, like the one my province was foolish enough to elect last year, that bear the full brunt of it.   Then there was his idea that the solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons and criminal recidivism was to release those detained for criminal offenses back into the general public as soon after their arrest as possible.   Does this sound like someone who can be trusted to pass legislation protecting people from “online harms”?

 

Captain Airhead inadvertently let slip, last week, the real reason behind this bill.   In an interview he pined for the days when Canadians were all on the same page, got all their information from CBC, CTV, and Global, before “conspiracy theorists” on the internet ruined everything.   He was lamenting the passing of something that never existed, of course.   People were already getting plenty of information through alternative sources on the internet long before his premiership and the mainstream legacy media became far more monolithic in the viewpoints it presented during and because of his premiership.   What he was pining for, therefore, was not really something that existed in the past, but what he has always hoped to establish in the future – a Canada where everyone is of one opinion, namely his.    This is, after all, the same homunculus who, back when a large segment of the country objected to him saying that they would be required to take a foreign substance that had been inadequately tested and whose manufacturers were protected against liability into their bodies if they ever wanted to be integrated back into ordinary society, called them every name in the book and questioned whether they should be tolerated in our midst.

 

Some have suggested that Bill C-63 is not that bad compared with what the Liberals had originally proposed three years ago.   It still, however, is a thinly-veiled attempt at thought control from a man who is at heart a narcissistic totalitarian and whose every act as Prime Minister, from trying to reduce the cost of health care and government benefits by offering people assistance in killing themselves (MAID) to denying people who having embraced one or more of the letters of the alphabet soup, had a bad trip, the help they are seeking in getting free, deserves to be classified with the peccata clamantia.   It took a lot of pain and effort for this country to finally rid herself of the evil Section 13 hate speech provision that Captain Airhead’s father had saddled us with in the Canadian Human Rights Act.   Captain Airhead must not be allowed to get away with reversing that.

 

It is about time that he took a walk in the snow.   Or got badly trounced in a Dominion election.   Or fell screaming into a portal to the netherworld that opened up beneath his feet.   Any of these ways works.  

 

The time is come.  The time is now.  Just go. Go. GO!   I don’t care how.  Captain Airhead, would you please go now?! (3)

 

(1)   Anyone who thinks the allegations were proven needs to learn the difference between evidence and proof.   Evidence is what is brought forward to back up a claim.   Proof is what establishes the truth of a claim.   That the evidence advanced for the allegations in question simply does not add up to proof and moreover was flimsy from the onset and has subsequently been largely debunked is an entirely valid viewpoint the expression of which is in danger of being outlawed by the bill under discussion.   In a court of criminal law the burden is upon the prosecutor to prove the charge(s) against the defendant.   Not merely to present evidence but to prove the accused to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The same standard must be applied to allegations made against historical figures and past generations.   They, after all, are not present to defend themselves against their accusers.   To fail to do so is to fail in our just duty towards those who have gone before us.   The ancients had a term for this failure.   It is the vice of impiety.

(2)   The folly of legislation against hate was best expressed by Auberon Waugh in an article entitled “Che Guevara in the West Midlands” that was first published in the 6 July, 1976 issue of The Spectator, and later included in the collection Brideshead Benighted (Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1986).    Michael Wharton, however, writing as “Peter Simple” was second to none, not even Waugh, in ridiculing this sort of thing.

(3)   Apologies to Dr. Seuss.

Worse than Infidels

“Take heed”, the Lord Jesus Christ told His disciples “and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” (Matt. 16:6) It was not, as His disciples initially supposed, literal bread against which He was warning them, but the teachings of these first century Jewish sects. The frequency with which He told His disciples not to follow the example of the Pharisees suggests that He recognized in this a temptation to which His followers would be particularly prone.

When, therefore, we consider the Christian duty enjoined upon us by the Great Commission, whether we interpret that commission in a high church sense as speaking of the ministry of Word and Sacrament of the organized Church or in the evangelical sense of the duty of all believers to tell others about the Gospel (1) we ought always to keep in mind as a warning Christ’s declaration:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. (Matt. 23:16)

Clearly there is a right and wrong way to evangelize and we ought to be wary of the kind of theology that subordinates all other concerns to the very real need to bring the Gospel to those who have not yet heard it.

Consider a popular evangelical response to the present migration situation. For some time now a massive wave of migration has been going on as thousands of people from what used to be called the Third World but which the politically correct word police now insist we call the Global South have been moving into the countries of what used to be Christendom but is now known as Western Civilization. Some are coming claiming to be refugees or asylum seekers, legitimately and illegitimately, some are going through the proper channels to immigrate legally, whereas many others are just swarming in, but refugee or immigrant, legal or illegal, they are coming. A standard evangelical response is to say that we should look upon this as an opportunity and welcome them, because they here are the unevangelized arriving on our doorstep.

There is truth in this response. Yes, these people need the Gospel, yes, most of them have not heard the Gospel, yes, we have a Christian duty to share the Gospel with them, and yes, their having come to where we are certainly makes evangelizing them more convenient for us. This is not the whole side of the story however, and it is going too far to say that because of the evangelism opportunities it creates we ought therefore to welcome this wave of migration as a blessing.

When a country experiences immigration on a large enough scale to noticeably alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the country’s population this will have a number of negative effects on the country. Some of these negative effects will be economical and these will be felt the most by the poorest people in the country as the influx of newcomers increases the labour supply, driving down wages, and increases competition for jobs. This will especially be a problem if the country already has a high rate of unemployment. There are other ways, however, in which large scale, demographic-transforming, immigration negatively affects a country. The trust in one’s neighbours and countrymen, the social capital so essential to a sense of community – a sense of who “we” are – has been demonstrated to be seriously compromised by the diversity that this kind of immigration brings. (2) Furthermore, a country’s most basic rights, freedoms, and legal protections of the same, can be placed in jeopardy by this kind of immigration if the cultural tradition in which these things are rooted is seriously threatened.

These are exactly the negative effects this kind of immigration has been having in my country, the Dominion of Canada. When Canada was founded in Confederation 150 years ago as a self-governing Dominion within the British family of nations, it already was culturally plural with three basic ethnic communities – English-speaking Protestant Loyalists, French-speaking Roman Catholics whose religion, language, and culture had been protected by the British Crown after the Seven Years War and the Indian tribes of various religious persuasions, Christian and otherwise, who had signed treaties with the British Crown. A common allegiance to the British Crown, albeit for different reasons with each group, was the sole factor uniting these different communities – which is the reason why immigrants ever since have had to swear allegiance to the Crown to obtain citizenship. Our parliamentary form of government and our Common Law rights and freedoms are rooted in the cultural tradition attached to the Crown. The Liberal Party of Canada has, since the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, waged an assault on that cultural tradition using mass immigration of the type we have been discussing as one of its chief weapons. With the weakening of the British tradition in Canada has come a weakening of our basic rights and freedoms, one which was not successfully repaired by the Liberal Party’s attempts in 1982 to shift these onto the new basis of a written Charter. (3) Since the Liberal Party regained control of Parliament in 2015, it has set immigration targets at a record high, despite Canada’s having an unemployment rate of just under 7% which the Party seems determined to drive even higher with its ill-conceived, economy-killing, environmentalist schemes, such as the carbon tax.

For an evangelical Christian to endorse this sort of thing, just because it makes evangelism more convenient is an act of impiety in the extreme.

Impiety is the name of the sin with which Christ charged the Pharisees when He accused them of getting around the commandment to honour their fathers and mothers by declaring the portion of their wealth that could otherwise have been used to support their parents to be corban, i.e., dedicated to the temple treasury. (Mark 7:1-13) It is, as its name suggests, the opposite of piety, the ancient virtue which consisted of showing proper and dutiful respect and devotion to God and to one’s parents and ancestors. That devotion to God and to one’s parents/ancestors were so closely connected as to be a single virtue is recognized in virtually every ancient tradition – Plato made this the focus of his Euthyphro, the Romans regarded pietas as one of the chief virtues, and C. S. Lewis provided several examples of the same thought recurring in other traditions in the appendix to his The Abolition of Man. (4) In the Hebrew Scriptures, the commandment to “honour thy father and mother”, in addition to being the first commandment with a promise, as St. Paul notes, is placed immediately after the commandments outlining duties to God and before the commandments outlining duties to one’s fellow men, making it possible to link the commandment with the first set. The ancients understood that duty to one’s parents and ancestors involved looking out for the good of their descendants as well and so piety by extension includes devotion to one’s entire family and household. Devotion to the spiritual household – the family of God, the church – and patriotism, devotion to the national family, are further extensions of this duty.

St. Paul, in his first epistle to Timothy, pronounced the judgement of Christianity upon impiety. Having instructed Timothy to regard elder men in the church as fathers, younger men as brothers, elder women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, he tells him to honour widows, saying that if a widow has children or nephews they should “learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable before God.” (5:4). Of those in the church who refuse to do this, he writes “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (5:8)

The same judgement applies to those who sanctimoniously cite evangelistic opportunity, as a reason for supporting and welcoming immigration and refugee policies that have harmed and are harming – perhaps irreparably – their countries.


(1) The Great Commission is worded differently in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, St. Matthew’s wording lending itself to the high church or catholic interpretation, St. Mark’s to the low church or evangelical interpretation.
(2) Dr. Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, and author of the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, conducted an extensive study on the effects of diversity on social capital. He published his findings in 2007, writing that “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’-that is, to pull in like a turtle” which means that they “tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century”, Scandinavian Political Studies, 30:2 (June, 2007), pp. 137-174.
(3) See my “Civil Libertarians of Canada: The Charter is Not Your Friend”: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2015/05/civil-libertarians-of-canada-charter-is.html
(4) C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), in which the first example under “Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors” is “Your father is an image of the Lord of Creation, your mother an image of the Earth. For him who fails to honour them, every work of piety is in vain. This is the first duty.” Hindu. Janet, i. 9 is cited as the source. In this appendix, Lewis is providing examples of what he, borrowing the term from Chinese philosophy, calls the Tao, i.e., universal natural laws underlying traditional moralities.