ἐνταῦθα ἵστημι

It is the Kalends of January once again.   On the civil calendar this is, of course, New Year's Day, and the year 2023 AD is upon us.   On the liturgical kalendar, it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, falling as it does on the octave day of Christmas, that is to say the eighth day of Christmas when "eight maids a-milking" is one's true love's gift by the old carol and, more relevantly, when Jesus was circumcised in accordance with the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law.   This is also the day upon which I post my annual essay telling about myself, who I am, and where I stand on various matters.   As usual I shall begin by mentioning where I picked this custom up.   I learned it from a man who was one of my own favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who was a career op-ed columnist with the Orlando Sentinel whose thrice-weekly column was syndicated by King Features.   Reese wrote a column like this once a year, sometimes at the end, sometimes at the beginning, and recommended that other writers do the same.  I believe the Rev. Chuck Baldwin has also followed Reese's recommendation in this matter.

This is on the one hand the easiest essay I have to write every year and an the other the hardest.   It is easy in the sense that I know the subject thoroughly and intimately and no research is required.   It is the hardest because it pertains primarily, not to my thoughts on passing events, but to my more basic convictions and principles underlying these thoughts, and since these remain very constant it is something of a challenge to write this every year in a way that is fresh and not one that might as well just say "see last year's essay".  The title can be the biggest part of this challenge and this year as in 2019 I have recycled the title of the first of these essays, the quotation "Here I Stand" from Dr. Luther, by translating it into a classical tongue.   It was Latin in 2019, it is Greek in 2023.

I am a Canadian and a very patriotic Canadian provided that by "Canada" is understood the great Dominion envisioned by Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George Étienne Cartier and the other Fathers of Confederation, established by the British North America Act of 1867 which came into effect on 1 July of that year.   If anyone is offended by this mention of our country's founders, I assure you the offense is entirely intentional on my part, you will never hear one word of apology from me for it  no matter how entitled you feel to such an apology or how imperiously you demand it, and nothing would delight me more than to offend you further.   I was born and have lived all my life in Manitoba, which is the eastmost of the prairie provinces situated  pretty much smack in  the middle of the country.  While I have lived in the provincial capital of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century, I still consider myself to be a rural Manitoban rather than a Winnipegger.   I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in the southwestern part of the province.   In between growing up there and moving to Winnipeg I studied theology for five years at what had once been Winnipeg Bible College, was Providence College and Theological Seminary when I studied there, and has subsequently become Providence University College.   This is a rural school located in Otterburne, about a half hour's drive south of Winnipeg near the small town of Niverville and the village of St. Pierre-Jolys.   

I started on the path that led me to study theology at Providence when I was fifteen years old.   That summer, the summer between my finishing Junior High in Oak River Elementary School and beginning High School at Rivers Collegiate Institute I came to believe in Jesus Christ as my Saviour.    This was the type of experience that in evangelical circles is called being "born again".   Interestingly, the evangelicals who borrow this phrase from Jesus' nocturnal interview with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and apply it to personal conversion tend to avoid the term "believe", so emphasized in the Johannine and Pauline literature of the New Testament and indeed in the very discussion in which Jesus' introduces the idea of the new birth and replace it with language such as "invite Jesus into your heat" and "make a commitment to Christ".   Infer from that what you will.   My conversion was certainly a matter of faith, of believing and trusting which are, of course, the same thing approached from different angles.   I had had some religious instruction as a child.   My family was mostly mainstream Protestant, United Church and Anglican, and in addition to what I learned from them, in elementary school we said the Lord's Prayer every morning and in the younger grades had Bible stories read to us.   No, this is not because I am extremely old - I am a few months away from my forty-seventh birthday and a few years younger than the Prime Minister.   The Bible and the Lord's Prayer persisted in rural public schools long after urban ones had abandoned them, and it was not until my sixth year that the Supreme Court of Canada gained the same power to remove these things from the schools that its American counterpart had had and had exercised around the time my dad was born, and it was much later that it began exercising those powers the way the American court had done decades earlier.   At any rate, in my early teens I had gained a deeper understanding of the message of the Christian faith from the Gideons' New Testament that I had been given - in school - when I was twelve, and books by Christian writers such as Nicky Cruz, Billy Graham and Hal Lindsey that I had borrowed from the library.   I had come to understand that Christianity taught that God is good, that He made the world and us in it good, that we had made ourselves bad by abusing the free will He had given us and sinning, but that God in His love had given us the gift of a Saviour in His Son, Jesus Christ, Who, like His Father and the Holy Ghost, was fully God, but Who by being born of the Virgin Mary became fully Man while remaining fully God, and Who, being without sin Himself, took all the sins of the whole world upon Himself when, rejected by the leaders of His own people, He was handed over to the Romans to be crucified, and Who offered up His Own Suffering and Death as payment for the sins of the world, a payment, the acceptance of which was testified to by His Resurrection, triumphant over sin and death and all else associated with these things.   We are unable to achieve or even contribute to our own salvation, it is given to us freely in Jesus Christ, we merely receive it by believing in the Saviour.   When I was fifteen, I was finally ready to do so and believed in Jesus Christ as my Saviour for the first time.

While I was still in high school I was baptized by a Baptist pastor.   Much later as an adult I was confirmed in the Anglican Church.  Many would probably see this as two steps in opposing directions.   I left the mainstream denominations after my conversion because of how heavily permeated by religious liberalism - a compromised form of Christianity that seeks to accommodate all the Modern ideas that are hostile to orthodox Christianity and as a result resembles outright unbelief more than faith - they were and was baptized in a fellowship where the Bible was still taken seriously.   Strange as it may seem, however, the same basic principle led me to take the second step and seek confirmation in the Anglican Church.   That principle is that Christianity should be believed and practiced the way it has been believed and practiced in every age and region of the Church since Jesus first instructed the Apostles.   I would later learn that St. Vincent of Lérins had beautifully encapsulated this principle in his fifth century canon: "In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est", which means "So in the Catholic Church itself, great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed always, everywhere and by all."  Liberalism remains a problem in the mainstream churches, indeed, it is much worse now than thirty-some years ago, and so when I joined the Anglican Church it was a parish that had been associated from the beginning with the Anglican Essentials movement that had started up to combat liberalism about the time I was graduating from High School.   In my continued study of the Bible and theology, however, I had come to see that the principle of St. Vincent's canon should not apply merely to the absolute fundamentals but to the faith as a whole.    While I remain firmly Protestant in my Pauline and Johannine conviction that salvation is a free gift that we are incapable of earning or in any way contributing to but must receive simply by faith and in my conviction that the authority of the Church - and God has established authority in the Church - and her traditions - beliefs, practices, etc., handed down through from one generation to the next, an essential safeguard against reckless experimentation and so overall something that is very good rather than bad - are and must be both subject to the final authority of the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, I have come to strongly oppose what I call hyper-Protestantism.    Hyper-Protestantism rejects not merely the sort of things the early Reformers like Dr. Luther had fought against, which were generally things introduced by the patriarch of Rome after the Church under him had separated from other equally old Churches - the Byzantine Churches in the eleventh century, the Near Eastern ones in the fifth - and so were properly distinctively Roman, but much of what is genuinely Catholic as well - a good rule of thumb is that if it is shared by these other equally ancient Churches it is probably Catholic not Roman.   It holds the same view of Church history - that the Roman Empire, after legalizing Christianity, immediately created a false Church, the Catholic Church, that those who held to the true original faith opposed as a persecuted minority throughout history - that is common to all the heretical sects from the Mormons to the Jehovah's Witnesses that hyper-Protestants call "cults", although ironically what distinguishes the "cults" from the other hyper-Protestants is that they, that is the cults, are more consistent and take the logic of this deeply flawed view of Church history to its logical conclusion in rejecting the Trinitarian faith of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, an irony that is all the more poignant when one takes into consideration how reluctant hyper-Protestant evangelical leaders have been to expel from their midst leaders who have prominently defected from Nicene Trinitarianism themselves by rejecting the Eternal Generation of the Son.   I think that re-inventing the wheel and fixing that which is not broke are among the stupidest things human beings try to do and that this holds double when it comes to religion and faith.    Nobody has been able to produce a statement of Christian faith that better expresses the core essentials than the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, nor one which does a better job of shutting out all opportunities of heresy than the Athanasian.    Nobody has been able to devise a  better form of Church government than that established in the New Testament.   Christ placed His Apostles as the governing order over His Church, establishing them as a new albeit different sort of high priesthood - this no more conflicts with the universal priesthood of all Christian believers than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priests conflicted with the proclamation in the Torah of the universal priesthood of national Israel and St. Paul uses Greek words in Romans to describe his ministry as an Apostle that can only be used of an established priesthood - and they used that authority to establish two other orders to assist them, the deacons (ministers) first, who were charged with looking after food distribution and the like, then as the Church spread beyond Jerusalem, the presbyters (elders) who were also initially called episcopoi (overseers) because they were the administrators of the local Churches who answered to the Apostles, and to admit others such as Timothy and Titus to their own order, which appropriated the  title episcopoi from the presbyters to itself  soon after the Apostles died in order to reserve "Apostle" for those directly commissioned by Christ.   This form of governance has served the Church well for two millennia, apart from the problem of a certain member of the post-Apostolic episcopal order intruding into the jurisdiction of other bishops and asserting supremacy over the entire Church, and nothing that has been thought up to replace it in the last five centuries has been an improvement.    Contemporary forms of worship are hardly improvements on traditional liturgies derived from ancient  sources.   While obviously many disagree with me on this last point, and many others who don't would say that it is subjective, a matter of aesthetic preference,  traditional liturgies are generally far more theocentric, focusing God and requiring an attitude of reverence from the worshipper, whereas contemporary worship is much more anthropocentric - or perhaps autocentric - focusing on how the worshipper feels about God, and  encouraging familiarity over reverence.

I describe myself as a Tory.   I have to explain this every time I do so because in common Canadian parlance Tory is used for members and supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada.   There are also those who call themselves small-c conservatives to indicate that conservative refers to their political ideas rather than their partisan allegiance.   When I say that I am a Tory, however, it is with a meaning that I would contrast with both big-C and small-c conservatism.   As with small-c conservatism it is not about party allegiance.   It is the institution of Parliament that I believe in, support, and am concerned  about, not any of the parties that vie for control of it every Dominion election.   Each of these parties is constantly prattling on about "our democracy" but it is Parliament the institution not democracy the abstract ideal that I care about and this is a significant part of what I mean when I say that I a Tory.  While democracy is an old word, going back to ancient Greece where it was used for the constitutions of various cities, most notably Athens when she was at the height of her cultural influence, since its revival in the Modern Age it has been used for an abstract ideal.   Abstract ideals are as old as the word democracy, of course.   The "Forms" that feature so prominently in Plato's dialogues could be described as abstract ideals.   An abstract ideal is something you see in only in your mind and not with your eyes.   While this is traditionally regarded as where Plato and Aristotle diverged from one another - Plato thought the Forms were more real than the physical world, that everything in the physical world was an imperfect copy of some Form or another, and that the Forms could be perceived only through reason, whereas Aristotle thought that the Ideas, his  modified version of the Forms, were not in some other realm but embodied in the physical world, and had to be observed in the things in which they were embodied - for both, the abstract ideals they were concerned with were universal ideas that in some way or another were connected to specific concrete examples in the physical world.    Modern abstract ideals are not like that.   The Modern conceit is that man has the rational power to think up entirely in his head something superior to anything that exists in the concrete world and that he can improve or even perfect the concrete world by forcing it to conform to these ideals.   I reject this way of thinking entirely and reject the "democracy" that is this kind of ideal.   In my country, the politicians who speak the loudest about "our democracy" have the least respect for Parliament, its traditions and protocols, and its constraints upon their doing whatever they want.   Indeed, the current politician who uses the phrase "our democracy" more than any other, is the Prime Minister who seems to think that it means his right, having barely squeaked out an election win, to govern autocratically and dictatorially until the next election.   Nor is there any reason for him not to think so because "democracy" as a Modern ideal with no essential connection to the concrete is whatever the idealist wants it to be.   No, it is Parliament not democracy that I believe in, because Parliament is real and concrete, a real institution that is ancient, that has weathered the test of time and through that test proven itself.

Since this - believing in and supporting concrete institutions that have been proven through the test of time rather than abstract ideals that Modern minds think up and seek to impose on reality - is such an essential part of what I mean by calling myself a Tory, it should be obvious that my belief in and support for hereditary monarchy is even stronger than my belief in and support of Parliament, for it is an older and more time-tested institution.    I have been a royalist and monarchist all my life, and, as a citizen of Canada, a Commonwealth Realm, have been a loyal subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II all my life until her passing late last year, when I became a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III.

Parliament needs monarchy.   The seats of the House of Commons are filled by popular election, and each elected Member has a duty to represent the constituency he represents as a whole, to the best of his ability, looking out for their interests whether they voted for or against him.   He also, however, faces pressure from the party to which he belongs to support their interests.   There is a potential conflict of interest here and in that conflict it is his duty to his constituents that ought to win out over his duty to party.   Some nincompoops think the system could be improved by "proportional representation" - another abstract ideal - which, of course, would settle the conflict in favour of the party over the constituents every time.   Mercifully, the King, who is above Parliament as Head of State, has no such conflict of interests because he inherited his office and is not beholden to any party for it.   He, therefore, can do what no elected Head of State can do, and represent the country as a whole as a unifying figure, in whose name the government elected in Parliament exercises executive power and in whose name the runner-up party, His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, holds the government accountable to Parliament.   While this does not eliminate the divisiveness of partisan politics altogether, it does usually prevent it from getting as bad as it is in the republic south of our border.   In addition to being such a time-proven source of unity, order, and stability monarchy represents the older view of society as an extension of the family, which is superior to the Modern view of society as an extension of the commercial marketplace represented by the republican model.   

When I call myself a Tory I mean, therefore, someone who believes in our traditional institutions, first and foremost the monarchy, but also Parliament, because they are real, concrete, and of proven worth, over and against Modern schemes to improve or perfect the world by imposing abstract ideals upon it, a political way of looking at things that I believe is complementary to my small-o orthodox, small-c catholic, traditional Christian faith discussed above, and so, like such Tories as Dr. Johnson and T. S. Eliot before me, I put the two together under the term.   This, as I said before, intentionally draws a contrast with both big and small c conservatives.   This is not because they would necessarily disagree with my support for said institutions or my faith, but because these things are not essential to what they mean by "conservative" the way they are essential to what I mean by "Tory".    What small-c conservatives see as essential to conservatism is a set of views that is no different from those held by those who call themselves conservatives in the United States who are small-r republicans and, these days, usually big-R as well.    

The United States is a Modern country in the sense that it was founded by men who chose to break away from the British Empire to which they had belonged and its older tradition that still included elements from before the Modern Age and to establish their country from scratch on the foundation of Modern abstract ideals.   While something is not necessarily bad or wrong because it is Modern, the more Modern the mindset the more one tends to be blind to what was good or right before the Modern Age.   Indeed, one recurring aspect of Modern thought is the tendency to view history as a linear march from the bad in the past to the good in the future, variations of which include the nineteenth century "Whig Interpretation of History" associated with the British Whigs (liberals), and the twentieth century idea of the End Of History, associated with American neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama who wrote the paper and book by that title.   Indeed, the very concept of "progress" when used in a political sense is a version of this Modern theme.   This theme is closely associated with the Modern take on abstract ideals that I have already discussed.   Both Modern thoughts are fundamentally a rejection of the truth recognized both by the ancients and by the Christian Church that human beings live within boundaries or limits, some of which they cannot cross, others of which they cross only at their own peril.    Both the ancients and the Church recognize some such limits as belonging to the nature of the world - in theology we would say that these are limits built into Creation.  Christianity recognizes other limits as being the result of man's fall into Original Sin.    Mankind, created good, damaged his goodness by sinning in the Fall, and was expelled from Paradise.  While fallen man can accomplish many great things and can strive for virtue and justice and Goodness, Truth and Beauty, he cannot perfect himself and regain Paradise through his own efforts, but must rely upon the grace of God.   In the New Life which Christians live out in the world in this age, the Kingdom of God is present in one sense, but in the fullest sense the coming of the Kingdom and the restoration of redeemed man and Creation to Paradise awaits the Second Coming of Christ at history's end.   Modern thought is based upon a rejection of this, upon a rejection of the idea of respecting limits in general, on the idea that man through Modern reason and science can perfect himself and regain Paradise through his efforts, which the Modern mind conceives of as the Kingdom of Man rather than the Kingdom of God.   It would be foolish to deny that Western Civilization has accomplished anything worthwhile in the centuries it has been dominated by this kind of thinking.   I would say, however, that as impressive as Modern accomplishments may be in terms of volume and quantity, in terms of quality the most  valuable parts of our civilization's heritage are those that come to us from ancient times and Christianity.   Another aspect of Modern thought is that when its earlier experiments fail to produce perfection and Paradise on earth, it tries again, and its new abstract ideals and new experiments, not only fail again, but tend to make things worth.   The longer man travels on the road of trying to achieve Paradise by his own efforts, the closer to Hell he will get.   The liberalism that the United States was built upon in the eighteenth century was a set of early Modern ideas.   In the early twentieth century a new "liberalism" emerged in the United States consisting of later, worse, Modern ideas.   The conservative movement that  arose in the United States after World War II  was largely a response of the older kind of liberals to the emergence of the new.   It was good that someone was fighting the new liberalism, which has since been replaced itself by something far, far worse, but I maintain that a firmer foundation to stand on is one that recognizes the greatest wealth of our Western heritage to be that bequeathed to us from ancient Greco-Roman civilization and Christendom and respects the limits recognized by these older forms of our civilization, rather than the shifting sands of early Modernity.

There is, of course, much in the small-c conservatism with which I agree.   I will list two sets of views that I share with most small-c conservatives in Canada and the United States, or at least the small-c conservatives of the generation prior to my own.   The first is the following:

- Abortion is murder and should be against the law, and the same is true of euthanasia, now euphemistically called "medical assistance in dying".

- Human beings come in sexes of which there are two, male and female.

- There are three genders - masculine, feminine, neuter - but these are properties of words not people.

- Marriage is a union between a man (male adult human being) and a woman (female adult human being - not so difficult to define now, was that?)

- Divorce should be hard to obtain not easy.

- Families should be headed by husbands/fathers.

- Children should be raised by their parents loving but with firm discipline, corporal if necessary, and not just allowed to express and define themselves anyway their immature minds see fit.

- Teachers in schools are in loco parentis and 100% accountable to parents.

- The job of a teacher is to teach children such basics as reading, writing, and arithmetic.   If a child fails to learn he should be held back.   If he learns he should be rewarded.   If he misbehaves he should be disciplined. If all the children in a class fail to learn the teacher should be sacked.   If instead of teaching said basics the teacher tries to convince boys that they are girls or vice versa and exposes them to sexually explicit material she should be arrested and severely penalized.   The same should happen if she tries to stuff their heads with anti-white racist propaganda.

-  The criminal justice system is not there to rehabilitate anyone.   If someone commits a real crime, that is to say murder, rape, theft, and the like, not some stupid thought crime that some dumbass politician or bureaucrat drew up, they should be punished, after due process has been done, of course, with a real penalty.   He should be given neither a slap on the wrist not made the guinea pig of some social experiment in rehabilitation.   Once the penalty has been paid, his debt to society has been discharged, and the matter should be declared over and done with.   It is perpetually subjecting him to efforts to rehabilitate him that is the true "cruel and unusual punishment".

-  The guilt for crimes - again, real crimes of the type just listed - is the perpetrator's and not society's.

-  Drugs of the type that alter one's mind bringing out violent and aggressive traits that would otherwise be suppressed and which are known to have this or similar effects even in small amounts so that they cannot be safely partaken of through practicing moderation are a huge social problem.   While prohibition may not be an effective solution, a government policy that encourages drug use by making drugs available at government controlled facilities in the name of looking out for the safety of the users is no solution at all but an exacerbation of the problem.

- Government policy should be natalistic - encouraging citizens to have children and replenish the population - and friendly to the traditional family - encouraging men and women to marry each other, remain married to each other, have their kids in wedlock, and raise their kids together.   It should not do the opposite - promote abortion and encourage every kind of alternative family setup to the traditional.   It definitely should not do the latter and then attempt to compensate for the social problems that arise from a large number of kids being raised outside of traditional families with expensive social programs that make matters worse, nor should it practice an anti-natalistic policy and try to compensate for the children not being born through large-scale immigration.

- Governments should neither discriminate between their citizens on such bases as sex and race, nor should they criminalize private prejudices or worse try to re-program such prejudices out of people.   If members of a minority population are overrepresented among those convicted of crimes this does not necessarily indicate discrimination on the part of the criminal justice system.   If the same minority population is also overrepresented among those whom victims of crime and eyewitnesses identify as perpetrators and if the same minority population is also overrepresented among victims of the same kind of crime the problem is not racism on the part of the institution.

That was the first set.   The second is the following:

- Taxes should be low and not designed to redistribute wealth.

- Governments need to balance their budgets rather than run deficits and amass huge debts.

- Governments should not follow the inflationary policy of using government spending to stimulate economic growth.

- Governments should only intervene in their domestic markets when there is a genuine national interest at stake.  If, for example, a country needs resource X, which it can produce at home but can import cheaper, if  the foreign supply chain is unreliable or there is a possibility of it being cut off by war, and interruption of supply would be a disaster rather than a temporary inconvenience, the government has a legitimate reason to protect domestic production.   Otherwise, people are better managers of their own businesses and affairs than government are.

The first set of these views which I share with small-c conservatives I consider to be by far the most important and essential of the two.    Small-c conservatives tend to think it is the other way around.    This is yet another reason why I prefer "Tory" as I have explained it, to "conservative".

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

Bad Politicians Pass a Bad Bill

As anyone who has followed my writings for any significant length of time will know when I identify my politics and general philosophy as Tory this is not in reference to the Conservative Party.   This is something that I wish to emphasize in light of the disgraceful behaviour of that party in the last couple of weeks.   To me, being a Tory means being loyal to and supporting traditional institutions that have proven themselves over long ages of time.   In the political sense the primary such traditional institution is hereditary royal monarchy.   The second such institution is parliament.   True Toryism means placing these institutions ahead of abstract ideals like democracy, equality, and even freedom although freedom is not just an abstract ideal but also a basic human good, a good which over the long run is better protected by traditional institutions than by political crusades launched in its name as an abstract ideal.   It also means suspicion and skepticism towards the utopian schemes of those who think that either such ideals or what they consider to be "science" should be the basis of a new, re-ordered, engineered society.    It is a confidence in traditional institutions over the long term, rather than the people who make them up in the short term.   This needs to be stressed especially in regards to parliament.   Earthly human institutions, even traditional ones, are not infallible.  They are of necessity made up of people, and therefore fallible due to the flaws in fallen human nature.   Parliaments are made up of politicians, who have more than their fair share of those flaws.

 

The recent actions of our Canadian Parliament alluded to above in reference to the disgraceful behaviour of the Conservative Party illustrate the point.   In passing Bill C-4, a bill which is objectively not only evil but insane, Parliament failed big time.   This was not because of some flaw in the Westminster System as it evolved over time that can be fixed by social and political engineers.   The problem is entirely in the character of the human beings who make up both the House and the Senate.  

 

Bill C-4 is a new version of a bill the Liberals introduced in the last Parliament which failed to pass the Senate in time to become law, itself a re-worked version of an earlier bill that had expired when Parliament was prorogued last summer.   It was introduced on the twenty-ninth of November, passed the House of Commons on the first of December when all parties extradited it, and passed the Senate on the seventh of December.    The bill that had been introduced in the last Parliament had been quite controversial and this new version, rather than remove the objectionable elements, made them worse.   Therefore, for the Conservatives led by Erin O'Toole to help the Grits pass this bill unanimously was for them to abdicate their duties in the role of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.   For the Senate to pass the bill so quickly was for them to abdicate their duty as the chamber of "sober second thought".  The Liberals, in this Parliament as in the last, are a minority government.   Even if they were a majority, they ought not to be able to fast-track controversial legislation like this.    Something is very, very, wrong here.

 

Bill C-4 amends the Criminal Code to forbid “causing another person to undergo conversion therapy”, “doing anything for the purpose of removing a child from Canada with the intention that the child undergo conversion therapy outside Canada”, “promoting or advertising conversion therapy” and “receiving a financial or other material benefit from the provision of conversion therapy”.   Now, some explanation may be required here.

 

There are people who, like almost everyone else, were born either biologically male or biologically female but who, unlike most other people, either a) think that they are of the other sex than what their body would indicate, b) think that they are some option other than male or female, c) identify as their biological sex but are sexually attracted to members of their own sex either instead of or in addition to members of the opposite sex, or d) are some combination or minute variation of the above.   Those among these who have politicized their gender/sexual identities – or allowed ideologues of the cultural revolutionary far-left to politicize these for them - and who collectively refer to themselves by an ever-increasing stretch of letters standing for the various labels they identify themselves with and which currently goes something like LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY, have demanded that “conversion therapy” be banned. 

 

Now, among those in the aforementioned group who believe their true “gender” to be different from the biological sex they were born with, some seek out reconstructive surgery that would make their bodies, at least in outward appearance, conform to the gender with which they identify.    This is not what is meant by “conversion therapy” and those who have been pushing for the ban on “conversion therapy” would be appalled at the thought of banning this sort of thing.   Indeed, many of them wish to see it available to young children with or without parental approval or consent.

 

No, “conversion therapy” could be said to be the opposite of the above mentioned procedure.   Whereas gender reassignment surgery is cosmetic surgery that makes the appearance of the body conform to the self-image, that makes the physical conform to the psychological, on the assumption that the physical is “wrong” and the psychological “right”, “conversion therapy” is psychological treatment aimed at correcting the psychological so that it conforms to the physical, on the opposite assumption, the assumption that the physical is right and the psychological wrong.

 

Now, among those who support legislation like Bill C-4 that bans “conversion therapy”, there seem to be many who base their support on the assumption that “conversion therapy” entails something like the Ludovico technique that features into Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange and the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film of the same title featuring Malcolm McDowell.   In that story, you might recall, Alex – the character portrayed by McDowell in the film – is the leader of a gang of “ultraviolent” youth that he calls his “droogs”, who, after robbing and beating an eccentric elderly woman, the last in a string of such thuggish acts, is abandoned by his friends, arrested, and charged for the murder of the woman who dies from her wounds.   In prison, he is offered the chance to get out early if he will undergo the experimental Ludovico technique that would make him incapable of reoffending.   The jumps at the opportunity.   The technique involves strapping him in a chair, with his eyes propped open, and forcing him to watch hours of extremely violent film footage, while he is injected with drugs that cause pain and nausea.    He is thereby so conditioned to experience pain and illness at the slightest thought of violence that he cannot even defend himself.   Proponents of Bill C-4 have certainly encouraged people to assume that this is how “conversion therapy” works.   The legislation itself, however, is worded in such a way as to cover a lot more than just this sort of thing.

 

The bill introduces into law a definition of “conversion therapy” as meaning:

 

a practice, treatment, or service that is designed to

(a)    change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual;

(b)   change a person’s gender identity to cisgender;

(c)   change a person’s gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth;

(d)   repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour;

(e)   repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity; or

(f)    repress or reduce a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.

 

Notice the following about this definition:

 

First, if someone were to create something like the Ludovico technique designed to turn a heterosexual person into a homosexual person, or a cisgender person into a transgender person, it would not meet the definition of “conversion therapy’ introduced in the bill.   Thus, although this sort of legislation has been sold to the public as a ban of a harmful technique akin to brainwashing it is no such thing.   No technique that has been used in “conversion therapy” in the past is banned by this legislation and remains legal under it provided the conversion is in the opposite direction of what the bill forbids.

 

Second, the definition is broad enough to take in any sort of counselling or advice that encourages people to recognize, acknowledge and identify as their birth sex and to live within the limits of traditional sexual ethics.   Indeed, (d) could be interpreted as banning the teaching of traditional sexual ethics altogether.   It would not surprise me if the clowns that now occupy Her Majesty’s bench in most jurisdictions in the Dominion were to interpret it in just this manner.

 

So what we have here is a definition that errs by being too broad and too narrow at the same time.   It is too broad in that it takes in things that government has no business legislating against – traditional sexual ethics and counselling based on the same.  It is too narrow in that it does not ban what the public has been told it bans – coercive and abusive techniques qua coercive and abusive techniques.

 

In its previous incarnations as Bill C-8 (first attempt) and C-6 (second attempt), this legislation met with opposition on precisely the grounds that the definition of “conversion therapy” was too broad and could take in professional and pastoral counselling, pulpit teaching and preaching, and even ordinary conversation in which traditional views of sexual identity and ethics are expressed.   The present bill has done nothing to assuage such concerns and, indeed, is worse than its predecessors in that whereas the earlier bills were attempts to ban “conversion therapy” for children the bill which actually passed Parliament also bans “conversion therapy” for adults.   The earlier versions were bad enough in that given the broad definition of “conversion therapy” they would have made criminals out of parents who seek out help for their children in accordance with their own consciences and beliefs rather than those of the left-wing ideologues in the Liberal Party of Canada.   With the passing of this bill, however, when it comes into effect the state of the law will be such that those who identify their gender as something other than the biological sex with which they were born will have no problem obtaining the kind of “conversion therapy” that consists of physical surgery to make the body conform in appearance to “gender identity”, and should someone for some reason or another want professional help in converting from heterosexuality to homosexuality or from cisgender identity to transgender identity  (1) the law would not prohibit some quack from providing this service even if it involves dangerous, pain-inducing, methods, but those who want help in accepting their biological sex or controlling same-sex desires that they believe it is wrong to act upon will be prevented from finding such help and anyone offering such help, even in the form of conversational counselling, will face criminal punishment for doing so.

 

A bill of this sort is fundamentally and thoroughly rotten legislation that is clearly aimed at imposing “woke” ideology as it pertains to sex and gender on Canadians at the expense of traditional religious and moral beliefs as well as personal freedom of choice.   It ought never to have passed Parliament at all, much less without debate and with unanimous support in both chambers, and with Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and the Upper Chamber of “sober second thought” both patting themselves on the back for refusing to do their jobs.    Parliament is an institution that has stood the test of time and proven itself over and over again, but if we keep sending to it the sort of people who currently fill its seats – and I include those on the Opposition bench as well as those in government in this – then cruddy legislation like this will keep making it into law.

 

(1)     A case can be made that what goes under the name “education” today in most schools (other than private and parochial ones) and universities amounts to little more than just this sort of “reverse conversion therapy” inflicted upon unsuspecting youth.

Prescriptive Authority, the Power of Numbers, and Justice

In my last essay I offered my commentary, for what the commentary of a royalist, Tory, Canadian is worth, on what has been happening in the republic on our southern border in the ongoing electoral extravaganza that is this year's presidential election.   I opened with a paragraph, explaining, as I usually do when putting my two cents in about such matters, that I have no dog in this race and pointing out why the whole affair confirms my belief in our own institutions.   Specifically, I meant the monarchy, obviously.   When you  fill the office of head-of-state, the person who represents the country as a whole, by popular election, you run the risk of a scenario where factionalism has gotten so extreme that whoever wins, approximately half the country will resent the outcome and refuse to accept it.   That is what happened in the last American presidential election, 2016, leading to this year's fiasco.   That is one of many reasons to prefer a hereditary head-of-state.

Today I offer something of an addendum to the previous essay.   I have often stated in the past that I believe in and support Parliament the institution rather than democracy the ideal.   Parliament is a democratic institution, of course, but it is not merely democratic.   It is very old, if we include the history of the Westminster Parliament on which ours is modelled.   Its antecedents go back at least to the Great Council of the Norman kings and arguably to the Witenagemot of Alfred the Great.   These are the ancestors of both Parliament and the Privy Council and the former became recognizable as such shortly after the Magna Carta Libertatum.   It became more democratic over time, of course, but its authority, like that of the monarchy in whose name it legislates, is derived from ancient, established, and proven usage, or, to use Edmund Burke's word meaning the same, prescription.    I stress this, even though (or especially because) it places me at odds with most of our "Conservative" politicians, and more so the liberals and socialists, all of whom prattle on forever about our "democracy", because prescription confers a stable, secure, authority on a governing institution.   Democracy the ideal, can only confer power on a government, and a volatile, unstable, form of power at that.   Remember the distinction between authority and power.   Authority is the respected right to lead, power is the feared ability to coerce.   Authority needs a certain amount of power to back it up at times, but woe to those whose governors have only power and no real authority.

Democracy is specifically the power of numbers.   That the power conferred by having numbers behind you does not automatically translate into the just use of that power is an observation that was central to all of Plato and Aristotle's writings about governance.   More recently, although it was a couple of centuries back, Alexis de Tocqueville in his commentary on democracy as he had observed it in the American republic, coined the expression the "tyranny of the majority" to warn about the danger of the misuse of democratic power.   Those who put together the constitution of the American republic were aware of this problem, which is why they put in features such as the Electoral College, rather than adopting a more simple democracy.   In the twentieth century there were those who tried to re-think democratic theory so as to eliminate the problem.   One proposal was to replace "majority rules" with "what everyone agrees on rules."   How such people failed to see that the potential for totalitarianism, already present in the older Modern ideal of democracy (there is a reason Jean-Jacques Rousseau is called both "the father of modern democracy" and "the father of totalitarianism"), is magnified, not lessened, by this substitution, is beyond me.   If democratic legitimacy is conferred by getting everybody to agree rather than a majority vote then those would claim democratic legitimacy for their agendas can tolerate no dissent.   Everybody must be forced to agree.   Is it not obvious how that has become the attitude of the present, "woke", Left?

Now, let us think about the last American presidential election and the current one.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency in the Electoral College.   His opponent, Hilary Clinton, had been expected to win.   A sizable percentage of those who voted for Donald Trump that year did so, not because they wanted Trump per se, but because they couldn't stand the thought of Hilary Clinton as president.   Or, as some wags put it, they figured she had had her two terms as president already and didn't need a third one.

The "woke" Left refused to accept this outcome.   Donald Trump, who before running for president was a television celebrity, became first an object of ridicule for progressives in the media, then an object of hatred.   Note, incidentally, how the behaviour of the media over the past four years clearly proves what liberals have, until fairly recently, tried to deny - that the mainstream media is overwhelming slanted to the Left.   Well over 90 percent of television newsreporting, somewhat less for the print media but still well over fifty percent, dedicated themselves to the destruction and demonization of Donald Trump, his positions, and his supporters.  Day in and day out, for four years, there was a constant bombardment from the newsmedia, and not just the American newsmedia, about what a horrible, racist, neo-nazi, bigot and white supremacist Donald Trump was.   The violent wing of the Left mobilized and took to rioting, vandalism, and outright assault on Trump supporters, and the media winked at it, if it did not expressly state its approval.

The media has now declared Biden the winner of this year's election.   In my opinion they have acted prematurely.   Biden's win has not been certified and is being challenged in the courts.   Even as the media was declaring for him, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered all of the late Pennsylvania ballots, that is, those received after the cutoff, separated from the others.   However, the point I am making does not depend upon who is ultimately and legally declared the winner,

More people turned out this year to vote for Donald Trump than in 2016.   More, not less.   In 2016 a sizeable section of Trump's votes were really votes against Clinton rather than votes for Trump.   That is not the case here.   Biden is not the kind of person to inspire either enthusiasm or hatred.   Those who came out to support Donald Trump this year - approximately half of the voters, whoever legitimately has the slight marginal lead - did so, because they love their president, in spite of the way he has been demonized for four years.   Interestingly, and this is something I will probably have more to say about at a future date, that includes record numbers of black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters.  (1) Conversely, apart from his own vote, assuming he remembered to cast one, and those of his immediate family, very few of the votes cast for Biden were cast for Biden per se.   I am not referring to all those who rose from the dead to vote, voted twice or more and in states other than their own, or those whose Trump votes may have been switched to Biden votes through some high-tech gizmo.   The legitimate votes for Biden were votes against Trump, by people who hate him.

"Love trumps hate", Hilary Clinton said in 2016.   The "woke" Left latched on to this as a slogan and have used it ever since, oblivious to the fact that hate better describes the vicious rage that energizes and motivates everything they do than it does the words and behaviour of Trump and his supporters.   Does "love", in the ordinary sense of the word, trump "hate" in the ordinary sense of the word?   If so, then Donald Trump, who has endured four years of bitter hatred directed against him, only to have a record number of people turn out and vote their love for him, is the moral victor, the person who deserves the victory, even if the number of those voting their hatred of him is slightly higher.

Which is yet another reason for preferring the authority which prescription vests in ancient institutions, whether our own monarchy and Parliament, or those of the 244 year old American republic, over the power of democratic numbers.

(1) This is something the pre-Trump Republicans were trying to achieve for about three decades.   Their method involved trying to divest themselves of their image as a "white" party by adopting a moderate version of the "rainbow coalition" policies of the progressive Democrats.  It failed.  Trump, by contrast, did pretty much the opposite of that.  He ran on a platform of stopping the export of jobs, controlling immigration, securing the borders, and supporting law and order, which obviously had a strong appeal to middle and working class, white Americans and which explicitly opposed the anti-white hostility that the Democrats' "rainbow coalition" had evolved into under Obama's presidency, but was not racialist in the way his demonizers absurdly claimed.   Lo and behold, it accomplished what the Bushes and Dole and Romney and McCain all failed to do. 

Crown, Parliament, and Common Law

I have argued several times in the past that it is Parliament the concrete institution that we should cherish and treasure and not "democracy" the abstract ideal. This is a point that is well worth repeating in this troubling moment. Liberals, progressives, and neo-conservatives such as those who write for the Postmedia/Sun newspapers nearly always speak in terms of the abstraction, democracy, when defending our form of government. The present crisis, however, demonstrates that it is the concrete institution that is most important.


Last week, Parliament was set to return from adjournment on April 20th. The Prime Minister told the press that it would be "irresponsible" for Parliament to resume in full session in the midst of the pandemic. Andrew Scheer, the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, came to the defence of Parliament's right and duty to hold the Prime Minister and Cabinet accountable. The Prime Minister dug in and insisted upon an arrangement that would make him and his ministers far less accountable to Parliament than what Scheer was pushing for. With the help of the far left minority parties, the Prime Minister ended up getting his way.


Writers from a broad spectrum of political opinion, from the centre-right commentator familiar from every major news medium, print, radio, and television, Rex Murphy, to the former leader of the socialist party Thomas Mulcair, rightly criticized the government over this, arguing correctly that in this crisis we need more accountability from the government rather than less. They did not comment on the dark symbolism of the fact that the Prime Minister's demanding and getting these arrangements that would reduce his own accountability to Parliament fell on the anniversary of the birth of the most notorious tyrant of the twentieth century. Perhaps they felt it would be unfair to draw attention to this coincidence. Earlier this year, however, when the Prime Minister tried to sneak provisions into an Emergency Spending Bill that would have given his Finance Minister unlimited tax and spend powers for which he would not be accountable in Parliament for two years, provisions that attacked the very foundation of Parliament itself, the Magna Carta and the "no taxation without representation" principle enshrined within it, he released the proposed bill on March 23rd. He hoped Parliament would rush it through in a unanimous one day vote on the next day. Mercifully the Opposition stood their ground, he was forced to back down that time and the Emergency Spending Bill, sans most of his power grab, was passed on Lady Day. The day when he sent out the first draft was the anniversary of the Enabling Act of 1933 - a bill which gave the new German Chancellor enhanced emergency powers to act independent of the Reichstag. That Chancellor was the same notorious tyrant born on April 20th. How many times does this sort of coincidence have to happen before it is no longer coincidence but the Prime Minister rubbing his dictatorial aspirations in our faces?


The abstract ideal of “democracy” can be easily reconciled with tyranny and dictatorship. The wisest of the ancients, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, all knew and taught, that democracy was the mother of tyranny. The man who is often credited with being the father of Modern democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is also known as the father of totalitarianism. Adolf Hitler, the tyrant referred to in the previous paragraph, was not only elected into office, but governed with the enthusiastic support of a vast majority of his people which he did not lose until the tide of war turned against him.


It is much harder to reconcile the ancient institution of Parliament, which has stood the test of time and proven itself over and over again, with tyranny and dictatorship. Dictators hate parliaments. It is no wonder that the Liberal Party, which was working towards establishing Prime Ministerial dictatorship even before it was infiltrated and taken over by ideological Communists in the 1960s, prefers to speak in terms of democracy.


If more Canadians had a greater appreciation for our traditional institutions, such as Parliament, there would be far greater outrage over what the Prime Minister has been trying to do, and we would be in far less danger of losing these institutions and the heritage of rights and freedoms which stands and falls with them.


In the Dominion of Canada – if you check the opening preamble and Section three of the British North America Act you will see that, unlike my calling what was renamed the “Constitution Act, 1867” in 1982 by its original title, “Dominion of Canada” is not merely a deliberate anachronism but is and remains to this day the full self-chosen title and name of this Commonwealth realm – our government is a parliamentary monarchy, modelled after the mother Parliament in Westminster. This constitution, more than any other the world has ever seen, embodies the concept of a mixed constitution – the combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a single constitution – which many in ancient Greece had come to think of as an ideal, superior to any of the simple constitution types, even before Aristotle discussed it as such in his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics.


Montesquieu, the eighteenth century French judge and political philosopher, is remembered primarily for articulating the distinction between the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of the state. Although the influence of this articulation was most noticeable in the development of the Constitution of the American Republic, whose Founding Fathers stressed the separation of the powers as checks and balances against each other, Montesquieu himself drew his inspiration from the ancient ideal of the mixed constitution as he found it in the writings of Aristotle and Polybius, and from its concrete manifestation in the Westminster Parliament. Montesquieu saw a correlation between the three elements of Parliament and the three powers, the Crown corresponding to the executive power, the Lords to the judicial power, and the Commons to the legislative. This correlation was not quite as precise as that between the elements of Parliament and those of Aristotle’s mixed constitution. Legislation, for example, requires an act of the entire Parliament and not just the House of Commons. A strength of the Westminster System is that while these powers are distinct, and separate to a degree sufficient enough for there to be balance, they are also united in the Crown. Thus, in the Westminster System the powers are spoken of as the Queen-in-Counsel, which is the Executive Power, the Queen-in-Parliament, which is the Legislative Power, and the Queen-on-the-Bench, which is the Judicial Power.


Although all three Powers are united in the office of the Crown, it is the Queen-in-Parliament that is traditionally understood as being the Sovereign Power. This is due to the nature of the Legislative Power. All of the Powers vested in the Crown are derived from the Law. When a new monarch accedes to the throne, the Coronation ceremony in which the King or Queen is vested with the powers and duties of the office of Sovereign, includes an oath to enact the Law with Justice and Mercy. The Legislative Power is the Sovereign Power because it is the Power to add to, subtract from, or otherwise alter, the Law itself.


Before looking more closely at the Legislative Power and the Law, let us observe here one more way in which the concrete, traditional institution of Parliament is preferable to the abstract ideal of democracy. Democracy can be either direct or representative. Direct democracy, which involves taking every government decision to the people in plebiscite, is obviously impractical except for the smallest of communities. The democracy that is an element of our Parliament, like the democracy that is an element of the American Republic, is representative democracy. Elected representatives in a representative democracy, whether parliamentary or republican, speak in the assembly on behalf of the constituency they represent – or, in countries foolish enough to abandon first-past-the post for proportional representation, the part of the population that agrees with them ideologically. Elected representatives each represent only a segment of the country, and taken collectively, only represent the country of the present moment. It is the role of the Head of State in any constitution to represent the polity in its entirety. An elected Head of State cannot do justice to this role. You can find all the necessary evidence of this assertion in the example of our republican neighbours. The election of every American President for the last thirty years, Democrat or Republican, has been followed by a “derangement syndrome” on the part of supporters of the losing party, or, in the case of the current President, supporters of the losing party plus a large segment of his own party. Nor is this exactly a new phenomenon. Following the election of the first Republican President in 1860, the states below the Mason-Dixon Line, all of which had opposed him, seceded and temporarily formed a new federal republic, which the United States had to invade and conquer in order to restore their “union.” Only a hereditary Head of State, who comes to the office by line of succession, can truly do justice to role of representing the whole of a country. This is especially true, when it comes to those who can only ever participate by representation because they have either passed on to the next world or have yet to enter ours. The Sovereign Power to alter the Law itself can only by right belong to the office of the person who can represent these as well as the interests of those living in the moment. Thus, the Queen is Sovereign, and Parliament, where the Sovereign as representative of the whole – past, present, and future – and the representatives of the moment meet and speak, is the place where her Sovereignty is exercised.


We often used the expression “law making” to speak of the exercise of this Sovereign Legislative Power of the Queen-in-Parliament. It is not an inaccurate expression, for passing a bill into law is indeed the making of a law, but it is important that we distinguish between the statutes passed in Parliament, which are specific laws, small-l, and what is meant by the Law, big-L. The big-L Law is spoken of in the singular, because it is a collective unity that includes all small-l laws. It is much more than the sum of all statutes ever passed in Parliament however, and, indeed, in our traditional system it has always been understood that the largest part of the Law is non-statutory in nature. By the non-statutory part of the Law I am not referring to the excessive amount of regulations that have been imposed by Cabinet ministers and their bureaucratic toadies in the last century as part of their unholy attempt to circumvent the constitution and the legislative process and subvert the Sovereignty of Queen-in-Parliament. I refer rather to the part of the Law that is not made by government, but discovered, being grounded in the underlying law that belongs to the larger, natural order of reality.


That underneath human laws, governments, and justice, there is an underlying law serving the end of an underlying justice, which belong to the larger order of reality is one of the foundational ideas of the Hellenistic civilization of the ancient world which, in one form or another, has remained foundational to the successors of Hellenistic civilization. The Christian civilization of Christendom, was built upon the Augustinian re-interpretation of the Hellenistic concept in which the true Law and justice were to be found in the City or Kingdom of God, of which the cities and kingdom's of men in this world are at best imperfect reflections. Even the liberalism of Modern Western Civilization, at least in its earliest stages, was founded upon concepts of a natural law and justice.


These concepts of a transcendent order of law and justice differ greatly between themselves, but they are variations on a common idea. The opposite of that idea - that law and justice are entirely man-made, being the mere expressions of the will of the strong -is just as old. In the first book of Plato's Politeia, the title of which is usually and misleadingly translated in English as The Republic, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon is the champion of the idea that justice is merely the strong imposing their will in the service of their own interests. The dialogue as a whole, of course, is Plato's articulation and defence, through the mouth of his teacher Socrates, of the transcendent order of law and justice. The transition into the Modern Age weakened the idea of this transcendent order. In the nineteenth century, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche attacked the Socratic/Platonic foundation of this concept in his The Birth of Tragedy, before turning his guns full blast on the Christian understanding of it in The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil, and resurrecting Thrasymachus with a vengeance in Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Will to Power. Nietzsche's influence over the last century was far greater than is often realized. Even more than Kierkegaard he paved the way for the existentialism of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. While the novels of Ayn Rand and Terry Goodkind illustrate his neo-Thrasmachyian idea of a "master morality" defined by the creative assertion of strong-minded and strong-willed individuals as he himself understood it, in National Socialist ideology the totalitarian State became the expression of the will to power. Leo Strauss and George Grant were undoubtedly correct in saying that in Nietzsche we must grapple with the great Modern critic of Plato.


This idea, that there is a natural order of law and justice, with which temporal laws and justice must conform in order to be just themselves, has as we have just seen, been a fundamental concept of Western civilizations since ancient Greece. The relationship between our temporal laws and the underlying natural law has been understood differently in various Western societies. One approach is to say that it is the job of enlightened rulers to think about the natural law, determine what its precepts are, and translate those precepts into statutes in as close to their abstract form as the limitations of legislation permit and then inflexibly apply them. There are traces of this approach in Plato. It is the approach of many post-Enlightenment continental civil codes such as the Napoleonic, and can be found in much liberal thought. Our own system takes a different approach, however, and this is one of the major strengths of that system and the reason why there has traditionally been so much more personal freedom under our system than under its rivals, even within Western Civilization as a whole.


We have seen that in our system, the Sovereignty vested in the Queen-in-Parliament comes from the Legislative Power, because this power can change the Law itself. The exercise of this Power, however, is not the primary function of any of our State institutions. When the Magna Carta was enacted, the single most important event in the evolution of the King’s Great Council into Parliament as we know it today, the primary duty of the emerging Parliament was not to pass statutes but to hold the Executive accountable for the taxies it levied and how it spent the revenue so raised. Similarly, the primary duty of the monarch and the Crown ministers was never the creation of new laws but the maintenance of peace and order at home and abroad. This is where the Judicial Power – the Queen-on-the-Bench – comes to the forefront.


The maintenance of peace and order at home is not a matter of telling people what to do and forcing them to do it. It is a matter of providing an acceptable venue whereby disagreements can be arbitrated so as not to escalate into cycles of destructive vengeance. The courtroom is that venue. Aeschylus, the fifth century BC Athenian tragedian, borrowed from the mythology of his native land to illustrate this in the only surviving complete trilogy of plays from ancient Greece, his Oresteia. In the first play, Agamemnon, the Mycenaean king returns from Troy, having avenged his brother Menelaus, burned the city to the ground, and taken the princess and doomed prophetess Cassandra as his trophy, only to be murdered in his bathtub in his moment of triumph as the result of a conspiracy between his wife Clytemnestra and his cousin and mortal enemy Aegisthus, both of whom are seeking revenge for different reasons. In the second play, The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon’s son Orestes returns to Mycenae at the command of Apollo to avenge his father by murdering his mother, which he accomplishes with the encouragement of his sister Elektra and his friend Plyades, but then finds himself pursued by the trio of avenging goddesses, the Furies. In the final play, The Eumenides, Orestes, with the Furies still in hot pursuit, arrives in Athens where he pleads for mercy to the city’s patron goddess. In response, Athena summons twelve Athenian citizens to the Areopagus, to help her decide the case. The prosecuting Furies make the case that Orestes must be turned over to them for punishment for the crime of matricide. Apollo steps in as advocate for the defence. Six jurors are persuaded by the Furies, six by Apollo, resulting in a hung jury. Pallas herself, in her capacity as judge, casts the final vote, acquitting Orestes, after which she appeases the Furies and decrees that from here on out the procedure so established, will take the place of endless spirals of retribution.


All of this demonstrates the basic principle that if people are going to live together in a common society, there must be a peaceful and orderly means of arbitrating disagreements which requires a governing body that will hear both sides and decide based upon the evidence, which has the authority to ensure that both sides abide by the ruling, and into the hands of which, punishment if there is to be such, must be left. This process presupposes both that there is a natural order from which the questions of whether an action is right or wrong, who is right or wrong in a dispute, or, if it is not as black and white as that, the proportion of right and wrong on each side, can be determined, and that this can be discovered by hearing and fairly evaluating all the evidence. In other words, rather than starting with the abstract principles of natural law, and then applying these to actual persons and situations, the courts start with the concrete situations involving actual people, and from these determine in an Aristotelian manner what the abstract rules of right and wrong are. Mistakes can be made in the process, for which reason judges are required to give explanations of their rulings which can be appealed to higher courts. On the principle that the law must be the same for everyone, however, the accumulated rulings of past cases, become the precedents that guide the courts in their present deliberations. These accumulated precedents, in a system which is fallible but contains an internal mechanism for its own self-correction over time, and which recognizes the fact that fallible and flawed human beings cannot be expected to fully measure up to the standards of natural law when taken in their abstract nakedness and so allows for mitigating circumstances and requires only what can be reasonably expected in a casuistic fashion, themselves make up the bulk of the Common Law. The purpose of Parliamentary legislation is to tweak this Law, it is not the source of it.


The Common Law system has historically and traditionally allowed for much greater freedom than any of its rivals. Law that arises out of fair, honest, and in-depth inquiry into the right and wrong of particular situations, is far less likely to result in unnecessary limitations on actions that are not mala in se than either bureaucratic regulations or even legislative statutes. As the case precedents of Common Law have accumulated over the centuries, and corrections have been made over time through Parliamentary statute, certain basic rights and freedoms became firmly established as has the understanding that under Common Law, Her Majesty’s subjects are not supposed to have to ask themselves “is this permitted” every time they want to do something because they are free to do whatever they want provided it is not explicitly prohibited by Law, and have the right to expect that these prohibitions will be few, reasonable, understandable and necessary.


Among the basic freedoms that had already long been established in Common Law precedent by 1982 were the four listed as “fundamental” in section two of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. All of the basic legal and civil protections against the arbitrary abuse of government power that are listed in sections seven through thirteen of the Charter, had also been long established Common Law rights. Habeas corpus, the right to have a court determine whether or not a detention is legal, was not given to us by the Charter, although it is listed in Section ten, but has been part of the Common Law for almost a millennium, predating the Magna Carta itself by a half century. The Charter neither gave us these rights and freedoms, nor made them more secure, but rather provided the government with loopholes by which to evade them. It was, indeed, an assault on the Common Law concept of rights and freedoms, which encouraged us to think of these as having been given to us by politicians, rather than arising out of natural law, through history and tradition.


It was also a further assault by the Liberal Party on the Westminster System which goes hand-in-glove with the Common Law, the two having evolved together over more than a thousand years of history. As we have seen, the Sovereignty of the Crown is its Legislative Power exercised in Parliament. The most basic Crown Power, however, is the Judicial Power which, as we have also seen, is the raison d'être of the State, and the institutional authority through which the Common Law develops out of natural law. For this reason the monarch’s office has been that of the highest magistrate since time immemorial, and the traditional final right of appeal under Common Law was directly to the Sovereign. By elevating the Supreme Court of Canada above Parliament, Pierre Trudeau’s Charter subverted both the Common Law and the Sovereignty of Queen-in-Parliament.


Today, our fundamental freedoms of assembly, association, and religion which although they are listed in section two of the Charter, have their foundations not in the Charter but are derived from natural law through Common Law, have been severely restricted to the point of being negated almost entirely, by the restrictions put in place to combat a strain of bat flu that has jumped to humans, perhaps with the assistance of the Communist government in China, and spread rapidly around the globe, producing nothing worse than the regular flu in most people, and killing so far a couple of hundred thousand, making it one of the least lethal plagues in history. We have been told to meet in groups of no more than ten – in some jurisdictions as low as five – at a time, to stay six feet apart from each other at all times, and churches have been ordered closed. These freedoms have not been taken away from us by legislation in either Parliament or the provincial assemblies. The restrictions are regulations imposed upon us by bureaucrats, specifically, the public health authorities. While it has been the provincial public health authorities that have done this, they have been following guidelines that the Dominion public health authority has passed on to them from the incurably corrupt and Communist-controlled World Health Organization. The fact that civil servants at any level of government have the power to restrict these freedoms to this extent and for so long – keep in mind they have been extremely reluctant until recently to even discuss an end to the restrictions and have spoken of these measures as having to be in place for a time frame that is totally unrealistic to anyone who takes into consideration anything other than the effort to combat this specific virus – is totally unacceptable and a great cause for concern. This is not the way our system of government is supposed to work. The reason civil servants, even provincial civil servants, have this much power in Canada today, is due to the Liberal Party’s assault, especially during the period from 1926 to 1982, on the Sovereignty of the Crown, Parliamentary authority, the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, and the rule of Common Law.