The King has Arrived

His Majesty, King Charles III accompanied by Queen Camilla has arrived here in the Dominion of Canada, where he will be giving the throne speech opening the new Parliament in person.  While it is not often in recent years that something happens in my country of which I approve, this is very much to my liking.

 

I have been both a royalist and a monarchist all my life.  I put the word royalist first because monarchism requires royalism for clarity.  Monarchy is the ancient constitutional principle of the rule of one – or better, the leadership of the one, for the suffix –arche indicates the idea of headship, source, leadership more than “rule” which is what the suffix –cracy suggests. The ancients recognized three basic constitutional principles, the one, the few, and the many, but also that there were good and bad forms of each.  The good form of the principle of the one is kingship, the bad form is tyranny.  Royalism is about kings and queens, not tyrants.   Kingship is an office that possesses authority by ancient prescription.  A tyrant never has authority, only power, which he generally obtains by gathering a mob of followers to support him.  Tyranny is closely intertwined with democracy and populism and always has been.

 

While my royalism and monarchism was initially instinctual and related to my general conservative and reactionary instinct, that is, an inclination for what is ancient, time-tested, proven, and traditional rather than what is faddish, popular, and theoretical, one of the many ways in which the office of kingship is superior to any sort of elected head of state is that it is not a political office in the sense of partisan politics. 

 

My great-aunt Hazel passed away this January.  Thirteen years ago in “Testimony of a Tory” I made reference to a conversation that she and I had over Christmas the previous year in which she wholeheartedly agreed with me when I said that I wanted Canada to remain a monarchy and never become a republic.  She regularly voted NDP and while that party’s most recent leader, Jimmy Dhaliwal, was a republican, its most popular leader in the last twenty years, the late Jack Layton, was a royalist. 

 

One of the most enthusiastic supporters of Canada’s monarchy in the last century and probably the most noted expert on our constitution that our country has ever had, Eugene Forsey, was literally all over the map politically, as far as party alignment goes.  Raised a Conservative, he was one of the founders of the CCF membership in which he abandoned at the time of the merger that formed the NDP, then sat in the Senate as a Liberal appointed on the recommendation of Pierre Trudeau, while all the time calling himself a “John A. Macdonald Conservative”. 

 

The Green Party’s former leader Elizabeth May, currently the only elected Member from that party, is a strong royalist.  

 

You don’t have to be a conservative to be a royalist, although, and I say this as a rebuke of those Canadians who call themselves “conservative” but think that American republicanism is the standard of conservatism, you do have to be a royalist to be a conservative in the truest sense of the word.  

 

Some have criticized kingship for all the pomp that surrounds it but this criticism is misguided.  The pomp of kingship is attached to the office and not to the man who holds it.  Furthermore, the pomp of kingship is a dignified pomp, which extends to other institutions associated with kingship, especially Parliament.  That there is as much dignified pomp in our House of Commons as there is we can attribute entirely to its association with kingship through the Westminster parliamentary system.  Democracy removed from such a setting is a petty, ugly thing, and it becomes much more petty and ugly when someone skilled at expressing the grievances of large numbers of people, regardless of whether these grievances are legitimate or not, uses that skill to rise to power.  The cult of personality that can form around such a person is attached entirely to the man and not his office and is dangerous as well as ugly.  We have seen this happen twice in the United States in recent decades.  The cult of personality surrounding the current American president is one example.  That which surrounded Barack Obama is the other.

 

In one of Alexandre Dumas père’s D’Artagnan romances, the character of Athos defends the office of kingship, saying something to the effect that if it should happen to be occupied by an unworthy occupant, honour and duty require that the office be respected, if not the man.  In the case of our current Sovereign I have to say that the man won an awful lot of respect from me when at the beginning of his coronation, in words he himself had added to the service, he replied to the welcome in the name of the King of Kings by saying “in His name, and after His example, I come not to be served but to serve.”  That is so much better than the overweening peacocking and hubris coming from the elected head of state south of the border.

 

So, a warm welcome to His Majesty.

God Save the King!

Constitutions and Controversies

I have said it before and will say it again - a republic is not a stable constitution.    To be clear, I am using republic in the sense of a government without a king or queen.   This meaning goes back to ancient Rome.   It goes back to the history of the city, I should add, rather than its Latin language in which "res publica" literally means "the public thing" and could be translated "commonwealth".   This is why there is a need to clarify the meaning of republic, because the Latin word was often used to translate the Greek politeia, which means constitution or commonwealth, even in works by Plato and Aristotle which clearly do not exclude kings from the concept.    A republic in the sense of a kingless government, a government without a crowned head of state, is unstable and the more democratic the republic, the less stable it is.   This is because it is the nature of elected assemblies that their members form factions or parties.   Sometimes these are basically carbon copies of each other, who compete for office, but basically offer the same thing to the electorate under different brand names.   This is usually a sign of stagnation, decadence and corruption.   Conversely, they might offer radically different and fundamentally opposed, ideologically driven agendas.   When this happens the assembly of elected representatives and the electorate itself tend to become polarized and to view the issues that divide them through the Manichean lens of a struggle between Good and Evil.   In this situation filling the office of head of state by popular election is like lighting a match and setting it to a powder keg.

 

This is one reason, although not the only one or even the most important one, even though it might be the most practical, why I am a lifelong Royalist and Monarchist.    The person who occupies the office of head of state is the person who represents the country as a whole.    It is difficult to do this when the office is filled by the partisan politics of popular election.   The more polarized partisan politics become, the greater this difficulty becomes.   When you have arrived at the point where half of the country says “not my president”, regardless of who wins the election, it is now completely impossible for the elected head of state to function as representative of the whole of the country.   A hereditary king or queen is the best head of state, and the only kind who can fully do justice to the role of representative of the whole country, because only a hereditary king or queen is capable of being fully non-partisan and even non-political since he or she owes the office to hereditary right rather than popular election.

 

While our republican friends south of the border have often boasted that their country has the longest history of the peaceful transfer of power  that is clearly not the case,   In 1861, their country literally divided over the previous year’s election of Abraham Lincoln, the first president from the newly formed Republican Party.   The states south of the Mason-Dixon seceded and formed a new federal republic, the Confederate States of America.   The states that remained in the Union then invaded the South and conquered them in what was the bloodiest war in their history, costing more American lives than their other major conflicts combined.   While my country, the Dominion of Canada, was founded in Confederation two years after the end of this war, the monarchy we share with the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth Realms is much older.   The last time the Crown changed heads in a way that could be described as less than fully peaceful was when George I, the first Hanoverian king succeeded Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, in 1714.   The following year, John Erskine, Earl of Mar, led a number of Scottish landlords in an uprising aimed at restoring the throne to Queen Anne’s brother James Francis Edward Stuart who had been excluded from the succession by the Parliamentary requirement that the heir be a Protestant, but the Jacobites did not come anywhere close to achieving their objective.   The last Jacobite rising took place in 1745 and was defeated in the Battle of Culloden in 1746, but since this did not coincide with a succession – it took place about half way through the reign of George II – it does not invalidate my saying that the original Hanoverian succession was the last to be less than fully peaceful.   Even if one wished to argue this point, however, the rising of ’45 predated the American Revolution by three decades and so my point, which is obviously that the Crown has been passed from head to head peacefully for longer than the American republic has been around, is made either way.

 

It is also worth noting that in the same period in which the Crown has been passed down from heir to heir peacefully, Parliamentary elections have been held and governments elected in the United Kingdom, the Dominion of Canada, and the other Commonwealth Realms without anything comparable to the results of the 1860 US Presidential Election.   This also can be largely attributed to the stabilizing factor of the monarchy.   Having a unifying monarch at the head of the state reduces the destructive potential of partisan politics in the elected assembly.   Furthermore, in Parliament under a royal monarch the official role of Opposition is assigned to the runner-up in each election, making it much less of a winner-takes-all contest, which also reduces the destructive potential of partisanship.   The official designation of the Opposition party is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, which re-emphasizes the unifying role of the monarch as the personal representative of the whole country, to whom loyalty is owed whether in government or Opposition.   Finally, Parliamentary government tends to be multi-party rather than two-party, and it is difficult for partisanship to develop into a polarized, Manichean, Good versus Evil, when the options are greater in number than two.

 

The current crisis of the American republic is a good illustration of how the combination of an elected head of state and a radically polarized electorate makes for a volatile combination.   It was evident long before November 3^rd that whoever won the 2020 United States Presidential election, approximately half of the country would say “Not my President”.   While those whom Auberon Waugh labelled the chattering classes have been accusing the incumbent of trying to undermine the democratic process, overturn the election results, and impede the peaceful and orderly transition to the next administration by alleging massive voter fraud amounting to an election theft, the reality, of course, is, that if the election was stolen through massive voter fraud, if the media themselves are either knowingly pretending this was not the case or simply turning a blind eye to the evidence because of their obvious and unhinged bias against the incumbent and the courts have been simply dismissing the evidence without really giving it a fair hearing out of cowardice,  corruption, or even a misguided desire to try and prevent the rift in their country from getting worse even if it means sacrificing truth, all of this, and not Donald the Orange’s attempts to expose all these shenanigans, is where the real threat to the American democratic process is to be found.   It is worth pointing out that these same chattering classes who are now claiming that to allege election fraud is to undermine democracy have spent the last four years making claims about Russian collusion in the election that put Trump into office that have a lot less substantiating evidence behind them than the charges concerning the 2020 election.   While they were handed a pile of ammunition to use against Trump on Epiphany by the foolish actions of some of his supporters – a small portion of the much larger number that had shown up to his rally and the majority of whom behaved lawfully and orderly just as he himself told them to – in storming Capitol Hill and forcing the evacuation of Congress, it should not be forgotten that the same pundits who are now making full use of that ammunition are the ones who have been pretending that Black Lives Matter riots are “peaceful protests”.   BLM has been attacking and terrorizing people since Trump was first elected, with these media commentators turning a blind eye to it, or even in some cases encouraging it.    This, of course, does not justify lawless and violent action on the part of the MAGA protestors, although it is worth noting the distinction Ilana Mercer has just made that the difference “between pro-Trump patriots and BLM detritus” is that the latter “trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s livelihoods, their businesses” while the former “stormed the seats of corruption.”  

 

What all of this demonstrates is that the polarization of America is again approaching the level of that of 1861 if it has not already arrived there or even surpassed it and that once again controversy over the election of their head of state threatens to tear their republic asunder.   While Trump’s media enemies would love to make him the scapegoat for this polarization, in actuality he is the product of it rather than its cause.   The polarization goes back to the election of Barack Obama, not, as progressives might argue, because white America is so racist it couldn’t stand the thought of a black president – it voted for him, after all – but because Obama, who had a unique opportunity to bury American racial division and promote true unity, chose to squander it, by bringing Critical Race Theory, a neo-Marxist form of racism that promotes racial hatred against white people because they are white by maintaining that all whites are racist and only whites are racist, out of the Ivory Towers of academe and into government policy.  I shall, DV, have more to say about this at a later time, but for now will simply say that the result was the polarization of American into dualing Manicheanisms, that is to say people convinced that they are the Children of Light fighting on the side of Good against the Children of Darkness fighting on the side of Evil, that are of a racial nature, which is an extremely combustible combination.   One of the Manicheanisms, the one which has rallied behind Trump, is approximately half-right.  The Democratic Party has indeed, at some point after 2004, become completely sold to Evil, although this does not make the Republicans the Children of Light.

 

I hope, for the sake of our American neighbours, that they can find their way back from the precipice upon which their republic is now teetering.   For my own country, I will say once again, God Save the Queen!

De Me Ipso

It is the Feast Day of the Circumcision of Christ otherwise known as New Year's Day. The year that begins today is the 2018th Anno Domini and never have I been happier at being completely out of sync with the times. This is, of course, the opposite attitude of that of the ignorant, mindless, nincompoop of a pretty boy who deceived my country into putting him into the office of Her Majesty's First Minister a little over two years ago and who has been using the calendar year as an excuse to justify his misdeeds ever since. To have little in common with that obnoxious twerp pleases me as well.

It is my custom, one picked up from the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, to begin each year with a full disclosure essay, letting my readers know exactly where I stand. I am a patriot of the Dominion of Canada, which celebrated her 150th anniversary last year, loyal to the Old Canada, to the vision of Sir John A. MacDonald and the other Fathers of Confederation and to the heritage of the United Empire Loyalists who fled north after the rebellion of 1776 to build a country on the foundation of honour and loyalty rather than progress and commercialism. If little traces of this Canada remain in the Canada of 2018 it is because of the treachery, deception, and betrayal of the vile Liberal Party, of which I am a sworn, lifelong, foe.

I am a Christian. I had a United Church upbringing, "accepted Jesus Christ as my Saviour," in evangelical lingo, when I was fifteen, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church when I was in high school, studied theology for five years at Providence Bible College and Theological Seminary (now Providence University College) in Otterburne, Manitoba and was confirmed in the Anglican Church of Canada as an adult. I hold to the orthodox theology of the Apostles', Nicene-Constantinopolitan and Athanasian Creeds, and to the final authority and infallibility of the Holy Scriptures of which, like any fundamentalist, I prefer the Authorized translation of 1611 but, unlike fundamentalists, regard as incomplete without the portions of the Greek Old Testament that had been read as Scripture by the Christian Church since the first century but assigned deuterocanonical status due to their absence from the Hebrew Old Testament. I reject the so-called "higher critical" interpretations of the Scriptures as codified unbelief masquerading as scholarship, but neither do I accept that proper interpretation can be found through simplistic, formulaic rules such as those of literalism or by private believers guided only by inner illumination that they associate, rightly or wrongly, with the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures were given to the church as an organic community of faith and it is to that body, collectively indwelt by the Holy Spirit, that the enlightening ministry of the Spirit is promised, and individual believers must pay heed to how previous generations of believers from the Church Fathers on, understood the Scriptures, if they are to hear "what the Spirit saith unto the churches."

Politically, I am a Tory. That is a statement of political conviction rather than partisan allegiance. As much as I dislike the Liberal Party, and despise everything that the parties to the left of the Grits stand for, I have little use for politicians of any brand, including those of the Conservative Party. As a Tory I am first and foremost a royalist and a monarchist, who believes in our parliamentary form of government if not in the politicians who make up its composition or the bureaucrats who carry out its daily business, and who looks upon his country as an organic whole, in which past and future generations are united with those living in the present who have a duty, as trustees acting on behalf of previous and future generations, to preserve and pass on our constitution and institutions intact. I am neither a Red Tory nor a neoconservative. Red Tories try to associate Toryism with socialism, pacifism, feminism, and all sorts of other left-wing causes I despise. Neoconservatives want to further Americanize our country making them no different from the Liberals who did so much damage in previous generations.

I am right-wing in the original and true meaning of the term - an opponent of the vision, values, and ideals of the French Revolution of 1789 rather than a supporter of those of the German Revolution of 1933.

I am a social, moral, and cultural reactionary. By this I do not mean a Puritan who wants the state to dictate everyone's personal choices and control their private lives and who condemns art, theatre and the music on the basis of non-aesthetic judgements. The Puritans were the first liberals, progressives, and leftists. What I mean is this: societies are made up of communities, which in turn are made up of families, and it is families, supported by churches, schools, and the larger community, that are responsible for passing on the customs, ways, and manners that make up culture and the basic rules of right and wrong to the next generation and for trying to instil in them the habit of choosing the right over the wrong. If families, and the institutions that make up their social support network fail in this task, the state cannot step in and do it for them, although it may have to clean up the mess that ensues. When I say I am a reactionary I mean that I firmly believe that our social organization, our idea of what constitutes right and wrong, our manners, customs, and habits, and our aesthetic sense of the beautiful, which is the good of that highest of cultural expressions we call art, have all undergone severe decay and degradation since the beginning of the Modern Age and that this process has been accelerating in the last sixty years or so.

I agree with most of the basic components of capitalism such as the private ownership of property and the general superiority of market freedom over central economic planning but I am less than enthusiastic about the whole which they comprise. If I am a capitalist, in the sense of a believer in capitalism, then, like Sir Roger Scruton, I am a "reluctant capitalist." While I think that most if not all of the accusations socialists make against capitalism are silly, stupid and easily debunked nonsense, I would say that it is quite vulnerable to the charge that it is the engine of progress, a bulldozer which uproots communities, breaks down traditions, and otherwise destroys everything the worth of which cannot be measured in dollars and cents if it stands in the way of economic growth. I do not believe international free trade to be the path to global prosperity and universal peace that liberals have been touting it as for centuries and believe that it is important for countries to maintain strong borders and that often a country's national interests might require it to protect its domestic producers even if it is more economical to import on the cheap.

I am opposed to the Third World invasion of all Western countries, aided and abetted by treasonous politicians, bureaucrats, and cultural and academic elites, which amounts to a reverse colonialism and which if allowed to continue much longer will culminate in the genocide of all Western peoples, culturally, if not in the literal, physical sense of the term that the whites of Rhodesia and the Boers of South Africa have faced since the Communist takeovers brought about by the cowardice and treachery of Western governments determined to sacrifice these countries on the altar of anti-racism. I realize that it is extremely unpopular to express such sentiments but, to anyone who takes offence at this I refuse to apologize and say bluntly, that if you have a problem with what I have said, then it is you, not I, that has a problem, and I am not sorry in the least. Furthermore I scoff at the idea that there is anything at all "racist" in these sentiments. The word "racist" is a weapon rather than a unit of communication, it is designed to inspire anger, hatred and rage towards those against whom it is hurled, by imputing to them the motivation of an irrational desire to oppress and harm others because of their ethnic origin and/or skin colour. In reality, however, those who hold to the views expressed in this paragraph generally do so because we do not wish to see our countries torn apart by violent racial strife, and it is those who throw accusations of racism around liberally who wish to stir up ill will towards others. They are bullies and tyrants, who hide behind masks of "tolerance" and "compassion" and who deserve to be stripped of their guise of virtue and exposed for the thugs they really are.

My resolution for 2018, apart from seeing the publication of my finally completed book The High Tory: Essays On Classical Conservatism By a Patriotic Canadian, is the same as my resolution every other year, which is to grow even more out of sync with our increasingly corrupt times!

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen!

The Conservative Leadership Race

As one whose lifelong Toryism is a matter of principle and conviction rather than partisan allegiance the present contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada has been of only tertiary interest, if that, to me. The party has compromised, sold-out, and otherwise betrayed the principles and ideals to which its name alludes time and time again.

Unfortunately, while the Conservatives cannot be trusted to live up to their own principles you can always count on the Grits to live down to our worst expectations of them as they do everything in their power to impose the latest version of their ever-changing insane ideology upon our country while feathering their nests, enhancing their power, and displaying the utmost arrogance and contempt for ordinary Canadians. The Liberal Party of Canada began its sordid existence as the party advocating selling out the heritage of honour and loyalty upon which our country was built for filthy American lucre and has spent a century and a half trying to undo Confederation, strip us of our traditions and legacy, rob us of our rights and freedoms and turn Canada into a pathetic, third-world, police state that hides the sheer nastiness of its politically correct oppressiveness behind a thin outward veneer of toxic niceness. Now, under the leadership of an intolerably arrogant, empty-headed and black-hearted coxcomb, the Grits have placed an onerous debt burden upon the backs of future generations of Canadians for centuries to come with their present extravagance, taken a gigantic first step towards the subjection of Christians, Jews, and all other non-Muslim Canadians to dhimmitude by passing, against widespread objection, a motion condemning Islamophobia, while seeking to shove the most recent gender insanity down all of our throats and, in complete disregard for the safety, well-being, and wishes of Canadians, thrown out the welcome mat to all those who pose enough of a security risk to be rejected as immigrants and asylum-seekers by our southern neighbour.

Therefore, while it is too much to hope that the Conservatives, returned to power, would actually put Tory principles into practice in their governance, such a return is to be wished if for no other reason than to rid the country of the disastrous misrule of the vile and loathsome gang of miscreants presently holding office. For a number of reasons – several decades worth of neglect in the teaching of Canadian civics in our schools and our having been swamped by Yankee pop culture in the same period being the chief two – the Canadian electorate treats our general elections as if they were the equivalent of American presidential contests and votes according to who the party leader is. Who the leader is, therefore, matters and so this race demands our attention.

Sadly, the quantity of the candidates seeking the leadership is far more impressive than the quality. Indeed, it is much easier to decide which candidates ought not to be allowed anywhere near the leadership than to pick one who stands out as deserving to win. Foremost among these is Kevin O’Leary. The Dragon’s Den star has been compared to American President Donald Trump but the comparison is cosmetic and superficial and has nothing to do with policy matters. O’Leary is a free trader and an immigration enthusiast, as well as being the most socially liberal candidate to ever seek the Tory leadership. He is most like Donald Trump in his personality – in his policies he is much closer to Justin Trudeau. It is hard to imagine a worse combination in a prospective Conservative leader.

The other Irishman, Erin O’Toole is also disqualified in my books. A Kisaragi Colour, the founder of the blog The Maple Monarchists, has surveyed the leadership candidates on their views of Canada’s constitutional monarchy. All who replied, either personally or through their staff, indicated their support of the institution to some degree or another, except O’Toole and Lisa Raitt, both of whom declined to indicate their position. This is a disqualifier. Royalism is a sine qua non of Canadian conservatism and someone who refuses to commit publicly to support of the monarchy has no business even running as a Conservative candidate much less for the leadership.

If the leadership were to be decided on that sole issue alone, Andrew Scheer would clearly be the best candidate as he indicated the most enthusiastic support for the royal institution by far of all the candidates in his response.

There are other issues to be considered, however, and here things become complicated because different candidates stand out as being the strongest on different sets of issues.

Take “social conservatism” for example. This commonly denotes the sort of moral and social positions that evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditionalist Catholic and Orthodox, and other religious conservatives would support. This would include being pro-life, i.e., opposed to abortion and euthanasia, a supporter of traditional one man/one woman marriage, and an opponent of the alphabet soup gang agenda, of feminism, and often of the legalization of recreational drugs such as marijuana. For a couple of decades the conventional wisdom has been that no party running on a socially conservative platform stood a chance of winning because Canadians are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. In fact the opposite is the case. Opposition to moral and social breakdown will always be more popular than tightening the purse strings and anybody with an ounce of sense knows that. The conventional wisdom exists to browbeat the major parties into not putting it to the test by running a socially conservative campaign. On social conservatism, the strongest of the candidates would be Brad Trost, MP for Saskatoon-University. Trost is an evangelical Christian, who has been outspoken on socially conservative issues throughout his political career, and who has opposed the shift towards social liberalism taken by the party under the interim leadership of Rona Ambrose.

On culture and immigration there is no good candidate. A good candidate would be one who takes the position that immigration, legal and illegal, should not be allowed to change the character of the country, that our government and not the immigrants themselves will select who is allowed in and that it will place the needs of our country first in doing so rather than those of the prospective immigrants, that we will not admit large numbers of either immigrants or refugees in periods of high unemployment and economic recession, that illegal immigration will not be tolerated and will result in the permanent disqualification of the queue-jumper for even legal immigration, and that our refugee admission policies need to be reformed to recognize the reality that the vast majority of asylum seekers are frauds. A good candidate would denounce the toxic cultural atmosphere of ethnomasochism and oikophobia that liberalism spent much of the last fifty years creating. No candidate dares to take this position, of course. The closest thing to it is Kellie Leitch, who is not close at all but who merely wants prospective immigrants to be screened for values that conflict with Canadian values, by which she means the values of the multicultural, feminist, progressive, liberal, left that has been denouncing her as a bigot for wanting newcomers to hold to their values. On this, as with social conservatism, a platform much further to the right that provided Canadians with a real alternative to liberalism for a change would garner much more support than the conventional wisdom would acknowledge.

On fiscal and economic policy if any of the candidates stands out it is probably Maxime Bernier.

Ideally, the next Conservative leader would be strong on all of these issues, but such a person does not appear to be present among the current candidates. Practically, the next leader will also have to be someone around whom the party can unite and who can generate enough popular support to oust the Liberals. Although this quality is harder to gauge, here too there is no name jumping off of the candidates list as the obvious choice.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that whoever the Conservatives choose as their leader will win by default simply because everyone will finally be sick to death of Justin Trudeau.

Contra Spiritum Saeculi

It is the first of January, the Octave Day of Christmas which is the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord and also New Years Day. This means that it is once again time for my annual “full disclosure” essay, a tradition I have borrowed from one of my favourite opinion columnists, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. In this essay I talk about myself and outline my basic convictions such as underlie all my writings.

I am a male Canadian, who grew up on a farm in Western Manitoba, studied theology for five years after high school, and has lived and worked in Winnipeg, the provincial capital ever since.

I am a life-long Canadian patriot. I say patriot rather than nationalist, because a patriot is someone who feels towards his country, its traditions and institutions, and people the same kind of affection he feels towards his home and family, whereas a nationalist is a zealot for an ideal vision of what his country ought to be, which may or may not have any anything to do with his country as it is and historically has been, and who may do terrible damage to his country in the name of that ideal. In Canada, the Liberal Party identifies itself as the party of Canadian nationalism, and their nationalism is the toxic cancer that has been killing the country I love for over half a century. My Canada is the Dominion of Canada, a British country built on a foundation of Loyalism, governed by a British parliamentary monarchy, with the British Common Law and all its prescriptive rights and freedoms and, in the English-speaking part of the country, British culture as adapted to the northern part of North America. The vestiges of this Canada lingered on in the farms, villages, and small towns of the rural area in which I grew up and while some of the responsibility for the erosion of this Canada belongs to Americanization, the Liberal Party deliberately targeted the old Canada for disappearance with its nationalism project. Renny Whiteoak, the hero of Mazo de la Roche’s epic Canadian Jalna saga, expressed his and his creator’s contempt for this project by dismissing all the talk of nationality with the question of what exactly was wrong with being a colony anyway. While the Dominion of Canada had been much more than a colony since Confederation in 1867, what de la Roche was getting at through her mouthpiece Renny, was that there was nothing wrong with Canada as she was before the Liberal nationalist project, a sentiment I certainly share as I share her cynical contempt for a project that had as its aim the rejection and replacement of everything that had traditionally and historically been Canada.

I prefer the word Tory over the word conservative to describe my convictions. Both words can refer to the members and supporters of the Conservative Party but this is not what I mean when I apply either word to myself. Conservative, when used today in North America in a sense other than the partisan, suggests an old-fashioned liberal – someone who believes in individual rights and liberties, limited government by elected representatives, low taxes and free markets. While this older kind of liberalism has its good points, unlike today’s liberalism of egalitarian social engineering, wealth redistribution, and soft totalitarianism masked with a smiling face and compassionate words, which has no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, I mean something more than this when I call myself a conservative.

I use the word Tory in Samuel Johnson and T. S. Eliot’s sense of the term – someone who is a royalist, a high churchman, and a classicist.

We live in a depraved age and it is in keeping with the degenerate spirit of the times that democracy, the rule of the people, is now ubiquitously thought of as being synonymous with freedom and legitimate government. Monarchy is regarded by those who think this way as an outdated and archaic holdover from the past that, if its survival is to be tolerated, must be confined to a merely ceremonial role. As someone who has been a royalist for as long as I can remember, I can see all of this for the malarkey it is. Democratically elected governments intrude into every corner and aspect of their citizens lives in ways kings and queens never dreamed of doing and historically people have been much freer under royal rule than under the dominion of a government which being of the people can do whatever it likes to the people, for it is the people doing it to themselves. Furthermore, democracy places power in the hands of those who can be trusted with it the least – ambitious, power-seeking, politicians. The only way to make government by elected politicians tolerable to those under it is by placing those politicians in the humbling position of being servants or ministers of a royal master, which is why monarchy is even more important in an era of democracy than ever before. Politicians can govern only as representatives of whose who elected them – those who live and can vote in the present day. It is kings and queens, whose position does not depend on popular election but is rooted in tradition, prescription and historical continuity, who represent the whole of their society, including past and future generations and so, it is monarchy and not democracy, that makes all the other elements of government legitimate. As usual, the spirit of the age gets everything completely backwards.

I grew up in a family that, when it attended church, attended the United Church, but had an evangelical “born again” conversion experience when I was fifteen, and was baptized as a teenager in a Baptist church. I was later confirmed an Anglican. When I say that I am a high churchman I mean this in the original sense of that expression, someone who believes in the Church as an organized institution, its institutional authority, and the importance of its organic and organizational continuity with the Church founded by Jesus Christ through His Apostles. In this too, my convictions run contrary to the spirit of our age, which values a vague and undefined spirituality but despises organized religion.

Which is not to say that there is nothing valid in the condemnation and criticism of the institutional Church one often hears. Fundamentalists frequently accuse the ecclesiastical leadership of the mainstream churches of abandoning the theological and moral truths that Christianity has taught for two thousand years and more often than not these accusations are correct. To give up on and withdraw from the institutional Church, however, in the fundamentalist manner, is to depart from the truth in another way, by falling into sectarianism and Donatism. There are many contemporary trends in the Church I deplore. The unbelief, masquerading as theology under the name liberalism, which rejects or reinterprets beyond recognition any traditional Christian doctrines that the liberal considers himself too enlightened to believe in today and replaces them with progressive political, social, and environmental activism is one of these. The abandonment of reverence and a sense of the sacred and a holy for a familiarity that comes close to blasphemy in much of the “personal relationship with Jesus” kind of evangelicalism is another. I would insist, however, that these are problems to be confronted and dealt with in the Church, rather than reasons to withdraw from it.

I derive this view of the institutional Church, from both an anthropological argument, that religion as an institution is fundamental to all true community, and, more importantly, the theological argument, that Jesus Christ Himself founded the Church as an institution which, collectively indwelt by the Holy Spirit, would continue His Incarnational Presence on earth as His Body after His Ascension, and which He promised the gates of hell would never prevail against.

I am a Protestant high churchman, like those prior to the Oxford Movement of the 1830s such as Dr. Johnson, and as such I do not regret the Reformation, with its necessary clarification of the Pauline doctrines of grace and justification and its recover of the position of highest authority for the Holy Scriptures as the Word of God, but I do lament the tendencies that later developed in Protestantism of making the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures a private and personal matter between the individual believer and God, contrary to the inspired words of St. Peter, to make the talk where someone gives his interpretation of the Scriptures the central element of communal worship rather than the sacrament of Holy Communion, to neglect the writings whose canonicity was less firmly established than the sixty-six books recognized by all Protestants but which were nevertheless read as Holy Scriptures throughout the Church from the first century onward, and to neglect a fifteen hundred year tradition of Scriptural interpretation, from the Church Fathers through the medieval doctors, apart from which no man can hope to understand the Holy Scriptures, the sources of the truth into which Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would guide His disciples, for that promise was made to the Church collectively, and not to the individual believer.

In classicism, as in royalism and high churchmanship, I set myself against the Zeitgeist. By classicism, I mean the idea that music, literature, and the visual arts exist with beauty as their end, and that beauty like truth and goodness is not whatever we decide it to be, but rather has real existence in itself as part of the established order of things as they are, and that therefore there are non-subjective standards whereby music, literature, and the visual arts can be and ought to be judged. This is not a very popular idea today, especially among artists and, counter-intuitive as this might seem, among art critics. This is because the opposite of classicism, romanticism, which is the belief that an inner well within the artist is the source of all true art and that the artist must follow his inner light rather than external, established order, came to dominate the arts in the nineteenth century, and was taken to the nth degree in the modernism and postmodernism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In identifying with classicism, therefore, I am not merely expressing a preference for Titian and Poussin, Haydn and Mozart, Dante and Shakespeare over Picasso, Schoenberg and Maya Angelou, I am saying that there is something fundamentally wrong and depraved with the latter.

In going, as a Tory, against the spirit of our forward thinking age in all of these things – royalism, high church traditional Christianity, and classicism – I am a reactionary, a term which is used as a label of abuse by those who believe in the false doctrine of progress, i.e., the doctrine that man has an infinite capacity to reshape and improve the world so as to create Paradise for himself on earth, but which I wear as a badge of honour, a habit I picked up from one of my favourite historical writers, John Lukacs.

As a reactionary, a man of the right – indeed, the far right in the truest sense of that expression, one which does not include Hitlerism which, properly understood, was an ideology of the left – I see most contemporary trends as being for the worse rather than the better. This is most evident in the realm of morality where all the old commandments and taboos, which served constructive social and civil purposes are being jettisoned in favour of a set of petty, banal, obnoxious, and increasingly ridiculous rules, designed to micromanage our personal relationships and communications with others so as to prevent us from hurting the feelings of a growing list of groups of people whose feelings are officially protected.

All of this nonsense comes from the idea of equality, one of the chief demons of the age. In the United States, right-liberals, i.e., conservatives, and left-liberals or progressives, argue over “equality of opportunity”, favoured by the former, versus “equality of outcome”, favoured by the latter. In the Tory tradition of Dr. Johnson and Evelyn Waugh, I reject both concepts, and all forms of the idea of equality, as a sick, evil, and depraved perversion of true justice. Justice, being rooted in the order of things as they are, is, like that order, hierarchical rather than egalitarian. I hope that it is not arrogant boasting to word it this way, but I have more sense than to believe in the equality of individuals, much less such drivel as the equality of classes, the sexes, religions, cultures, and the races, either as a description of the way things are or of the way things ought to be made to be. One does not have to subscribe to some crackpot ideology about how one’s own race or sex is superior to the others – which, by the way, is a fair description of the nominally egalitarian feminist and black advocacy movements – to recognize the folly of egalitarianism. Few things get my dander up more than the way these stupid and patently false ideas are shoved down all our throats by educators, clergyman, the media both news and entertainment – not that there is much of a difference anymore – and the government. None of these really believe this nonsense, however much they might lie to themselves and others, as is evidenced by the way they will not allow anyone to disagree with them but seek to utterly ruin the lives, careers, and reputations of anyone who in even the mildest way points out that their emperor has no clothes.

The only other absurd notion as protected against the observation of reality as egalitarianism is liberal individualism taken to its ultimate extreme in which reality itself is declared to be for each of us what we decide it to be for ourselves. If Bruce Jenner decides he is a woman, who are you or I to disagree? All the rest of us are expected to agree that he is a woman, just as if we were living out George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in which the inhabitants of Oceania, at war with one rival power one day, declare that they have always been at war with the other the next.

That this new morality represents some kind of quantum leap forward in human enlightenment is a proposition that no truly sane and intelligent person could entertain for a second. Give me back the old Victorian morality, I say.

It is a time-honoured New Years tradition to make resolutions of self-improvement on this day and so I make it my resolution for 2016, to grow even more out of step with the times in which we live, and I encourage all of you to do the same.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen!

Alberta's Left Turn

I had not been following the recent provincial election campaign in Alberta. I found it interesting, therefore, when Kevin Michael Grace over at The Ambler predicted an NDP win shortly before the election, but I was not really surprised when this prediction came true. Mr. Grace has frequently demonstrated his acute insight into the myriad of aspects of Canadian politics and the NDP and Alberta are not as odd of a match as many people seem to think. Capitalism and socialism have never really been polar opposites, they are more the opposite sides of a single coin, perhaps the plugged nickel. Both think that the acquisition of money is the purpose for human existence, with the difference between the two being that capitalists think that money should be obtained through the free exchange of goods, services, and labour whereas socialists think it is better for the government to take money from those who already have it and give it to other people. I don’t wish to trivialize this difference – the former, being relatively the more honest of the two, is clearly to be preferred by sane, decent, and normal people over the latter, the preference of crooks, scoundrels, and fools – but the difference pales in comparison to that between the shared assumptions of capitalism and socialism and the truth that there are many things more important in life than making money.

For as long as I can remember I have heard Alberta described as Canada’s “most conservative province” but I have long questioned the accuracy of this designation. It might have been true at one time. In the fall of 1936, Stephen Leacock, the famous Canadian professor, economist, social commentator, and humorist began a lecture tour of the Western provinces and he described his experiences in My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West In Canada, which was published by Thomas Allen in Toronto in 1937. In his ninth chapter, “Monarchy in the West”, Leacock wrote that:

People who know nothing about it always imagine that the West of Canada is far less British than the East. Apart from the Maritime Provinces this is not so. It is even the reverse of truth.

From this he went on to argue that the large number of Americans who had moved up to the Canadian West between 1905 and 1914 made “no great difference as to the British connection and British institutions” because Americans had been British originally, and were reverting to their roots. He put it in these memorable words:

It used to be said that the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian. It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor. His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won't miss what he shoots at.

If Leacock’s assessment of 1936 Alberta was accurate, that those settling the province valued Canada’s British institutions, had not a trace of republicanism, and that the former Americans among them would be the ones to fire that last shot on behalf of the Crown, then it might have been true to say, at that time, that Alberta was the most conservative province in the Dominion. That was then. This is now.

In Canada, a conservative is someone who believes in and supports the traditional British institutions of this country. This was historically true even of conservative French Canadians – and until the 1960s French Canadians were very conservative indeed – for while their primary concern might have been the preservation of their language, Roman Catholicism, and their traditional way of life, they understood that these things had been guaranteed by the Crown since 1774 and that had all of British North America gone over to the American Republic in the Revolution their language, religion, and culture would not have survived. The two best articulations of the political meaning of conservatism in the Canadian context, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and John G. Diefenbaker’s These Things We Treasure, the first by a central Canadian who grew up in Ontario and Quebec, the second by a Westerner, who grew up and practiced law in Saskatchewan before entering federal politics, both argued that Canada’s British institutions were the foundation and framework of our traditional rights and freedoms and that the latter stand and fall with the former.

If Alberta were the most conservative province in Canada that would mean that the ideas in the preceding paragraph would be more prevalent in Alberta than anywhere else in the country. Is this the case? Hardly. Indeed, one of the most curious things about many who identify as conservative in the province of Alberta is an inability to put two and two together and come up with four on this matter.

From 1963, when Lester Pearson became Prime Minister until 1984 when Pierre Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister, the Liberal Party of Canada waged an aggressive war against Canada’s British institutions and traditions. They removed the designation “Royal” from many institutions including the post office and the navy. They insisted that we needed a new flag of our own, even though the Canadian Red Ensign had been declared our country’s flag by Order-In-Council in 1945, three days after the end of the war in which it had been baptized our national flag in the blood of the soldiers who fought under it in our country’s finest hour. It was the Union Jack in the canton that made the old flag objectionable to them. These are just two examples, many more could be provided. At the same time the Liberal Party was attacking Canada’s British heritage and institutions it was also attacking and undermining the basic traditional freedoms of Canadians. In the early 1970s they added a law against “hate propaganda” to the Criminal Code, which set a bad precedent for freedom of speech by making certain types of speech illegal on the basis of the thoughts expressed within them. Existing laws governing speech, such as the law against incitement, only made speech illegal when it called upon people to commit violence and break the law. Then the Liberals passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, an attack on freedom of association patterned on the American Civil Rights Act of the previous decade, which further attacked freedom of speech with its chilling Section 13, designating hate speech as an illegal act of discrimination and defining it so broadly that virtually anything offensive to those protected against discrimination would qualify. Finally, when they repatriated the British North America Act, they tacked onto it a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that under the guise of securing for us the rights and freedoms we already possessed by prescription as subjects of the Crown, nullified those rights and freedoms. (1) These attacks upon traditional and basic prescriptive rights and liberties, producing the oppressive politically correct atmosphere that Albertan “conservatives” rightly object to, were carried out at the same time and by the same people who were ripping apart our British heritage, proving the analysis of traditional Canadian Tories like Farthing and Diefenbaker, that our freedoms stand and fall with our British traditions, institutions, and heritage, to be correct.

Yet many Albertan “small c conservatives” don’t seem to get this. To the last man they have an intense loathing for Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party, yet many of them show little interest in turning to Canada’s British institutions, traditions, and heritage. Indeed, I have known more than a few of them to approach our British heritage with an attitude of contempt scarcely distinguishable from Trudeau’s own. Royalism is the sine qua non of conservatism in Canada, a non-negotiable, and Pierre Trudeau was notorious for, among other things, his disrespect for Her Majesty, yet you will encounter in Alberta, far more than anywhere else in Canada, people who claim to be Trudeau-hating conservatives but who are republicans rather than royalists. Self-identified Albertan “conservatives” tend to be continentalists – sometimes to the point of being annexationists – and free traders, both of which, ironically, are positions that historically belonged to the Liberal Party. It is further ironic that free trade was only embraced by the Conservative Party in the 1980s under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, the Conservative leader most hated in Alberta, whose misgovernment drove traditional Conservative Party voters, not only in Alberta but throughout the West, into the Reform Party of Canada.

This does not sound like a conservative province – more like a belligerently regionalist province with a chip on its shoulder. Localism is an important element of conservative thought, but in a form similar to the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, never anti-patriotism.

Where then does Alberta’s “conservative” reputation come from?

Is it the most socially conservative province?

When one thinks of social conservatism – in the sense of opposition to the moral and social disintegration that has taken place in the United States, Canada and the rest of the Western world since World War as manifest in such things as the collapse of social authority, no-fault divorce, birth control, abortion, the sexual revolution, cohabitation without marriage, serial marriages, alternative sexualities, and the like – three voices come to mind as having spoken louder on behalf of social conservatism in Canada than any other – George Grant, William Gairdner, and Ted Byfield. All three were from central Canada.

Yes, that’s right, all three. Ted Byfield, the founder of the Alberta Report which joined Christian social conservatism with a defiant Western and particularly Alberta populism, was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. That, in itself, does not perhaps say much, especially since moral and social decay, and worse, government brainwashing of the young against traditional norms, has gone further in Ontario, under the premierships of McGuinity and Wynne than anywhere else in the country. Nevertheless, it is in Alberta that the Rev. Stephen Boissoin was dragged before the Human Rights Tribunal – they have one of these odious kangaroo courts in Alberta too – for writing a letter to the editor, criticizing the actions of the politicized homosexual movement.

More substantially, Albertans more than any other Canadians, love American popular culture and oppose any attempt on the part of the national government to protect domestic Canadian culture. While our cultural protectionist policies have been a complete failure, and indeed have done harm rather than good, my point is that there is nothing that has done more to erode traditional social institutions, the authority of parents, teachers, and churches, and moral standards, than Hollywood films, pop and rock music, and television programming. A social conservatism that is wed to an objection, at the theoretical level, to cultural protectionism on the liberal grounds of market freedom, is a social conservatism that has laid down, raised the white flag, and given up.

The other grounds on which some have claimed that Alberta is the most conservative province are those of fiscal and economic conservatism. Fiscal conservatism is the idea that the state should live within its means and not export its costs into the future for posterity to pay. The economic ideas regarded as being conservative in Alberta are actually economic liberalism – free markets, free trade, and low taxes to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit, promoting economic growth that creates jobs and generates wealth. These two ideas are not always compatible. The goal of economic liberalism is constant growth so it always calls for lower taxes, whereas fiscal conservatism recognizes that to meet its goal, of not creating burdens for future generations, taxes may sometimes need to be raised in the present. It has been my impression that for most Albertan conservatives when these two ideas and goals clash, it is economic liberalism that wins out over fiscal conservatism. At any rate, actual economic conservatism is a variation of economic liberalism called economic nationalism, in which the government passes laws and taxes that favour and protect domestic production, thus exporting its costs not to future generations but to foreign companies and countries, as an entrance fee for access to the national market. Needless to say this idea would go over like a ton of bricks in Alberta.

Which brings us back to what I said at the beginning about capitalism and socialism – they are not polar opposites, but two sides of the same coin. That Alberta, the bastion of economic liberalism in Canada, would flip the coin and a give a majority government to the socialist party of high taxes and even higher spending, the very opposite of fiscal conservatism, is less of a shock than it would have been had the province managed to put fiscally conservative economic patriots into power.

The NDP is about more than socialism, of course. It is also about feminism, abortion-on-demand, anti-white racism, climate change alarmism, the Orwellian thought control that is political correctness, and the triumph of the abnormal over the normal and the average over the exceptional. Albertans will find to their horror that it is these latter things, even more than socialism, that they have in store for them under an NDP government.

The NDP is also, however, the most anti-Canadian of parties, when Canada is rightly understood as being the British country, confederated under the Crown in Parliament in 1867, upon a foundation rooted in Loyalism. The NDP wish to finish what he Pearson-Trudeau Liberals started in the 1960s-1980s, and obliterate our British heritage entirely, abolishing the upper chamber in Parliament, and severing the country’s ties to the monarchy. Had Alberta truly been the most conservative province in the country, the NDP’s contempt for Canada’s British traditions and institutions would have prevented them from ever giving the NDP a single seat. Many Albertans, however, chose to join what ideas they had that were fiscally or socially conservative, to a very unconservative anti-Canadian, anti-patriotism that is not that far removed from that of the NDP, making this election’s outcome much less of a surprise, although no less of a disaster.

(1) Section 33 effectively nullifies all the rights and freedoms listed in section 2, and sections 7 through 15.

Congratulations To Their Royal Highnesses

When this weekend is over, Canada will be faced with the unpleasantness of another federal election, in which we get to yet again try and make up our minds which of the parties has put forth the least objectionable candidate. It is an extremely difficult decision to make as they are usually equally loathsome.

It is therefore good that we get to start this weekend on a positive note. The highest office in our government, thankfully, is never filled by a politician. That office is far too important to be left to the choice of the unthinking mob we call the "electorate". It is rather filled, by a constitutionally defined line of succession.

Currently that office is filled by Queen Elizabeth II of the House of Windsor. Upon her death or resignation the next in the line of succession is her son Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales. The next in line after Prince Charles is his son Prince William who as of this morning became the Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn, and the Baron Carrickfergus.

These titles were bestowed upon the Prince upon his marriage to the former Catherine Middleton, now Her Royal Highness, Catherine, Dutchess of Cambridge. Many of us across Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Queen's other realms, watched the royal nuptials this morning (I caught the end of it starting with the procession from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace).

May God save the royal couple, grant them many years of wedded bliss, and preserve their royal House to continue their blessed reign over our country.

Monarchism and Minarchism

Imagine that you are sitting at your dining room table. Having just finished your breakfast, you are glancing over the morning newspaper while you enjoy your cup of coffee and prepare for the coming day, when all of a sudden there is a knock on the door. You go to answer it and on your doorstep you find a man you have never seen before. He has with him a briefcase, a clipboard, and a smug, pompous, attitude of superiority.

You ask him who he is and he says “I am from the government and I am here to inspect your home to make sure it is up to regulation standards”.

Naturally, you ask to see the man’s credentials. He produces them and they appear to be legitimate it, so reluctantly and with a great deal of annoyance at having your daily routine disturbed, you allow him in.

The inspector goes through your house, from attic to basement, making sure you have working smoke detectors in every room, that your electrical, water, and sewage systems meet the latest standards. From time to time he makes snotty comments about the way you live:

“You know, you really shouldn’t have all these appliances plugged into the same circuit.”

“You should rearrange your furniture to make it easier for people to leave in case of a fire.”

Finally the inspection is over, and the inspector lets you know that you have passed. “Just by the skin of your teeth”, he adds, by his demeanor though not his words.

Was it a king or queen who authorized this invasion of your home? Or was it a democratic assembly composed of politicians who are elected by a general vote on a regular basis?

After the inspector leaves you realize you need to go right now or you will be late for work. In a hurry, and still irritated by the inspection, you get in your car and hurry towards work. A couple of blocks before you reach your workplace you hear a siren. You look in your rearview mirror and a police car is flashing its lights at you and a policeman is waving you over to the side.

You glance at your speedometer and see that you have been speeding – not recklessly, but enough to get you stopped.

You pull over to the curb and wait for the policeman. He walks up to your window and asks to see your driving license. He takes a look at it, hands it back to you, and asks you if you realized how fast you were going. Then he asks you why you aren’t wearing your seatbelt.

You had been so preoccupied in your mind with the inspection and getting to work on time that you had completely forgotten to fasten your seatbelt! Now you have been caught having committed two traffic offences at the same time, and the policeman is convinced that you are a troublemaking scofflaw and decides to make an example out of you. He gives you a tongue-lashing, writes you a big ticket, and sends you on your way to work, where you are now, of course, late.

Who thought up the idea of punishing people with fines for not wearing their seatbelts – an offence which can not possibly hurt anyone other than the offender? Was it a king? Was it a queen? Or was it not rather a bunch of progressive do-gooders in the democratic assembly?

You get to work and your boss chews you out for being late. You explain the circumstances and you notice that he isn’t really listening to you and seems to be worried about something. Then you remember that it is government inspection week at work too. Today the fire inspector will be making sure your employers fire detection system and fire escape routes meet government standards. Tomorrow the safety inspector will be inspecting your workplace, looking for potential hazards to your and your co-workers safety. Several other inspectors will be coming in later in the week. Preparations for these inspections have been hindering your companies productivity for the past month.

Who was it that tied your company up with so much red tape? Was this an innovation from the Crown or from the Commons?

The idea is widely held today that democracy is the form of government that is most compatible with freedom and limitations on government power. This notion, however, is contrary to the facts of history.

The last few centuries saw the triumph of Whiggery. In Whig doctrine, a country may have a king or queen (a head of state whose office is passed down through hereditary succession) but only if their position is reduced to that of ceremonial figurehead. The actual governing of the country must be carried out, by officials elected by the general public. In the Whig system the king or queen “reigns but does not rule”, is the “head of state” but not the “head of government”.

The Whig system should not be identified with constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. The confusion of the two is common but erroneous. The latter is a much older aspect of the English constitution which we in Canada have inherited. A constitutional monarchy, is a monarchy in which the office of king or queen regnant is established, defined, and filled by society’s constitution and the king, deriving his authority from the constitution, is therefore responsible to the constitution, to uphold it rather than to overthrow it by governing arbitrarily. A parliamentary monarchy is a monarchy in which the constitution dictates that the sovereign lawmaking authority of the king or queen is to be exercised “in parliamento”. Parliament is derived from the French word “parler” which means “to speak”. The concept here is that the people who live under a country’s laws should have a voice in the making of those laws. It is a completely different concept from the notion of democracy in which the people themselves are regarded as the sovereign power.

Constitutional parliamentary monarchy is an English tradition that goes back prior to the Norman conquest of 1066 to the time of the Anglo-Saxon kings. The line of Norman kings that started when William of Normandy secured his shaky claim to succeed Edward the Confessor to the throne of England by defeating his rival Harold II at the Battle of Hastings promised to govern according to the constitution and laws of Edward, which had evolved out of the constitutional reforms made by Edward’s ancestor Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, in the 9th Century. When John Plantagenet was compelled by his barons to agree to the Magna Carta in 1215 it did not really introduce anything new in the way of constitutional limitations on the authority of the king, so much as require in writing his agreement to uphold the existing constitution.

The triumph of the Whigs occurred in 1688 when Parliament forced King James II to abdicate and gave his crown to his son-in-law William of Orange. This did not have the immediate effect of reducing the office of king to that of ceremonial figurehead but it ultimately led to that because it represented the triumph of the principle of democracy over the principle of royalty in the constitution. Over the course of the three centuries since the so-called “Glorious Revolution” the implications of the Whig victory have unfolded as Parliament, especially the elected lower House, has taken over the role of actually governing, and the role of the Crown has shrunk to a ceremonial role.

If the Whig doctrine, linking non-intrusive, limited government, and freedom to the democratic principle is correct, then we should expect that over the last three centuries government would have shrunk, taxes would gone down, and government presence in people’s everyday lives would have all but vanished.

The exact opposite is true.

The more the important the principle of democracy has become in our mixed constitution, the more real governing power has been concentrated in the hands of elected officials and the bureaucracies they head, and the less of a role the Crown plays in government, the bigger government has become.

Over the last three centuries, the Parliaments of Great Britain and Canada have imposed income taxes on their peoples. The first income tax was introduced in Great Britain by the government of William Pitt the Younger in the late 18th century. Canada’s first income tax was introduced in 1917 by the Borden government. Income taxes take far more money out of the hands of the tax payers and raise far more government revenue than any other kind of tax. They were unheard of back in the days when the king was unmistakably the head of government as well as the head of the state.

Also unheard of, back in the days when kings had more real power, were these large government bureaucracies we have today with their armies of inspectors invading homes and businesses to enforce libraries of petty regulations covering every minute aspect of everyday life. Huge bureaucracies go hand in glove with mass democracy. The saying “a man’s home is his castle” is obsolete today in the age of democracy, but it actually meant something back in the age in which it has its origins – the age when kings ruled as well as reigned. Kings were simply not interested in passing laws to prevent you from hurting yourself and hiring huge numbers of civil servants to enforce these laws. The king had constables and magistrates to enforce the peace, i.e., to keep you from hurting others and/or upsetting the civil order. It is democratically elected politicians and the progressive “experts” they hire to staff their bureaucracies that created the “nanny state”.

Democracy, then, is not the foundation of a free and just society under a limited government, that liberal doctrine makes it out to be.

Nor is monarchy the antithesis of freedom that liberalism makes it out to be.

There have been bad kings and good kings. If the definition of good government, is a government that provides society with basic laws (laws which govern public areas, laws which prohibit actions that hurt other people and threaten the order of society, and which provide a just manner for people to settle disputes with one another) and enforces those laws, but otherwise lets them live their own lives, then the English parliamentary monarchy has been overall a good government through history.

What about a government that fails to enforce the basic rule of law, which instead enforces thousands of petty regulations about minute aspects of everyday life, which taxes people to death, which actively seeks to undermine other social authorities such as parents in the home and clergy in the church, which wages war against the social, cultural, and moral traditions of the society it governs? Would that not be the very embodiment of a bad government?

That is the kind of government we have, now that the principle of democracy has triumphed over the principle of monarchy.

There are some who would have us take the principle of democracy even further and abolish monarchy even in its present ceremonial role. Let them not be deceived into thinking that they would be furthering the cause of freedom, justice, and good government by so-doing.

Aristotle argued that the best hypothetical constitution of a society would combine the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, each balancing the others. What Aristotle wrote about in theory, materialized in the traditional English constitution of parliamentary monarchy, which we in Canada have inherited.

If we are ever going to see the constitution balanced again, and good government restored to this country, it will not be by allowing the principle of democracy to further overshadow the principle of monarchy. For this reason it is important to maintain the monarchy, even in its present ceremonial role. If the monarchy serves no other purpose it is as an anchor in the constitution of the past that will hopefully prevent the ship of state from drifting even further into the turbulent sea of progressive democracy.