One Victory Against the Encroaching Totalitarianism

If anyone was under the impression that my harsh, negative, assessment of our civil leadership’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in my last essay was overblown, they need only look at the dirty trick the Liberals tried to pull this week. Parliament, which adjourned on March 13th until Hitler’s birthday - draw your own conclusions, was temporarily called back on Tuesday to vote on an emergency spending bill. The problem was not the $82 billion that the government was seeking permission to spend. The problem was that the bill, as originally drafted, included several provisions that would give them the power to increase spending and taxation without submitting the increases to Parliament for a vote.

Perhaps they thought that the panic that the media – which in Canada is almost monolithically the mouthpiece of the Liberal Party – has generated would be sufficient for them to get away with this. Or possibly they thought that all of their efforts over decades to get Canadians to devalue the traditions and institutions we inherited from Britain and to forget the history and significance of those traditions and institutions had finally paid off, and that we would be willing to let them overturn the Magna Carta and the very foundation of Parliamentary government and our Common Law liberties.

Mercifully, it appears they were wrong. Tuesday morning it was reported that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition were doing their job and firmly standing up for our traditional, constitutional, limits on government powers and that in the face of this staunch defence, the Liberals had backed down from their proposed power grab. Which is grounds for hope in these troubling times. The spirit of liberty has not yet been entirely crushed within us.

Later in the day, it was clarified that the tax powers were all that the Liberals had removed from the bill and that they were still pushing for the spending and borrowing powers. The Tories dug in in their opposition to these as well. The parties entered into negotiations but the day ended without the House being called upon to vote. This Wednesday morning - the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary - it was announced that the Liberals had dropped all the provisions for extended powers from the bill, which as an emergency spending bill has just passed the House, and will undoubtedly clear the Senate and receive Royal assent within a day or two.

I have been very critical of Andrew Scheer’s past performance as Opposition Leader and his bumbling in the last election but now, when it counts the most, it looks like he has come through for Canadians. Andrew Cohen, writing for the Ottawa Citizen, has praised the Prime Minister’s performance in this crisis saying “This has been his finest hour.” I beg to disagree. This – not the Kokanee Grope, not the costume party in India, not the Blackface/Brownface Scandal, not the SNC Lavalin Affair – has been Justin Trudeau, revealed at his worst – an opportunistic, tyrant, who has tried to take advantage of a global health crisis to attack the foundations of our constitution and expand his own powers. This is Andrew Scheer’s finest hour, not Justin Trudeau’s.

I am under no illusions that the majority of my countrymen see it my way rather than Cohen’s. Canadians have been far too apathetic for far too long towards the riches of our inheritance in the Common Law and the Westminster System of Parliament. It is almost one hundred years since the famous incident when Lord Byng, Governor General of Canada, exercised the reserve powers of the Crown and refused Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s request for a dissolution of Parliament. King, who had been allowed to form a government despite not having won the plurality in the House, wanted the dissolution to save his own bacon because he faced an imminent censure in Parliament over a corruption scandal. Lord Byng’s refusal was an entirely appropriate use of the Crown’s powers to protect Parliament’s right to hold the government accountable, as such champions of our constitution as John Farthing and Eugene Forsey demonstrated in their books on the subject. In the next Dominion election, however, the Canadian electorate bought King’s execrable lies about the matter hook, line, and sinker and awarded him a majority government.

That the government’s first thoughts with regards to dealing with this crisis were that they need to expand their powers beyond what the constitution allows them is itself sufficient evidence that they do not deserve to be trusted with such powers.

The approach they have been taking to the COVID-19 pandemic is further grounds not to trust them. Remember that this is a virus which in over eighty percent of the cases we know about has produced no symptoms to moderate symptoms. The actual percentage of those who have contracted the virus of whom this is true is probably closer to 99.99%. Most people who are asymptomatic would not have been tested unless they were in a situation where they were known to have been exposed to the virus. Thus, an approach to containing the disease which focuses on protecting those most vulnerable to experience it at its worst rather than protecting us all by shutting everything down and forcing us all into isolation makes the most sense. Countries that have aggressively pursued such an approach have succeeded in containing the spread of the disease without going into extreme shut down mode. Ironically, the countries which Mr. Cohen lists in the second paragraph of his column have all followed this approach, unlike Italy and the United States whose mishandling of the crisis he decries, despite the fact that they are following the same kind of approach, albeit with varying degrees of severity, as our own government.

The model which Mr. Trudeau is following is that of advising – and probably eventually compelling – all Canadians to stay at home, away from the threat of contagion, and also from the sun and fresh air which are man’s most important natural allies in the fight against disease. This involves shutting down all “non-essential” businesses and promising that the government will take care of the huge segment of the workforce which now finds itself unemployed. Since government is not a wealth generating institution – despite sometimes having delusions to the contrary – this means that the burden it is taking upon itself must fall upon the only part of the private economy that remains open – the “essential” businesses that provide food and other necessities, putting a strain on these which will, if this lasts for any lengthy period of time, cause them to fail. This would result in far more deaths than the collapse of the medical system that Mr. Trudeau is trying to avoid by the long-term strategy of slowing the spread of the virus and pushing its peak into the future ever would. The modern economy is the way in which we have avoided the Malthusian consequences of our population size. Anybody who is not an idiot knows this. “Lives are more important than the economy” is a lie concealed behind a moral truism. Destroy the economy, and you destroy the lives that it sustains. The Holodomor of almost ninety years ago is an historical example of how a regime used that principle to destroy lives deliberately with malice aforethought. If the Trudeau Liberals accomplish the same it will be primarily through stupidity.

Nor is shrinking the economy to the point where it cannot possibly feed our population and so causing the deaths of masses by starvation the only way in which the model the Trudeau government is pursuing could produce disastrous results. As unemployment skyrockets, suicide rates are likely to rise as well. Furthermore, if “extreme social distancing” is kept in place for as long as the Liberals are saying is necessary – months rather than weeks – there will be a general breakdown in psychological and emotional health. Human beings are social creatures. They are not meant to live apart from each other. Force them to live contrary to their nature for a lengthy period of time and they will start to go bonkers. This too would contribute to a rise in suicide rates as well as other dangerous and destructive behaviour.

Furthermore, just as an extended shut down will rapidly burn up accumulated material capital, so an extensive period of “extreme social distancing” will burn up social capital – the trust between members of a community and society that enables them to function in a civilized way and cooperate for their own common good. The only kind of government that would want to destroy that is a totalitarian government that hates and persecutes all social interaction that is not under its direct planning and control, which demands the total undivided allegiance of its citizens, and which fears any and all rivals for its peoples’ loyalty, trust, and affection.

Those who would rather not live under that kind of a government, who still value our constitution in which Queen-in-Parliament and not Prime Minister-in-Cabinet is sovereign, and our Common Law rights and freedoms won a victory today. Let us practice eternal vigilance and pray that it is not short-lived.

The Progressives’ Penance

What is immigration? While that question may seem rather basic a proper definition of immigration goes a long way towards clarifying our thoughts on the subject. Immigration is the noun we use when we wish to speak of the act of immigrating as if it were a concrete thing. Immigrate is the verb that describes the act of moving into a country/society/community, not as a tourist or guest, but with the intention of taking out long-term or permanent membership in that country/society/community.

I wrote society and community alongside country, because a) nobody can move into a country without moving into a society and a community within that society, and because b) immigration affects society and community even more than it affects a country. A country is a geo-political entity, a territory under a common law and a sovereign government. A community consists of families who live as neighbors, usually with common schools, recreational facilities, etc., and who therefore have social ties to one another. A society, in the sense in which I am using the term here, is usually coterminous with a country in size, but is organic like a community in nature.

By definition, to immigrate you require a pre-existing country to immigrate to. From this fact we see that the oft-heard “we are a nation of immigrants” argument for liberal immigration policies is wrong. There is no such thing as a nation of immigrants. It is a contradiction in terms. What the people who mindlessly repeat this mantra are referring to is that the people who founded countries like Canada and the United States moved to North America from Europe and the UK. As true as that is, those people did not move to North America to become members of pre-existing societies that were already here. The founders of the societies that would become English and French Canada, and of the United States of America, were not immigrants, they were settlers or colonists. For that matter, the people who were already living in North America when the English and French settlers arrived, were not immigrants either when their ancestors crossed what is now the Bering Strait.

“But isn’t that just quibbling?” someone might ask. No, actually, it is not. What proposition are those who think that “we are a nation of immigrants” constitutes a legitimate argument arguing for? They are arguing that our country/society has no right to turn immigrants away today, except perhaps if a particular immigrant can be shown to be a criminal or terrorist.

The implications of that proposition, however, are that no country has a right to be a country. An essential part of the definition of a country is political sovereignty and that concept is meaningless if a country does not have the right to decide who they will accept as immigrants or even whether they will accept any immigrants at all (some countries don’t). It is in the immigration debate that we most clearly see that liberalism is the enemy, not of tyranny and the abuse of state power as it purports to be, but of society.

Now demonstrating that a country has the right to decide for itself whether it will allow immigrants in or not, is not in and of itself an argument that a country should restrict immigration. If you have the right to do something it does not necessarily follow that you will be right or wise in doing it. If a country has the right to determine its own immigration policy why would it be wrong to decide upon a liberal policy of basically letting whoever wants to come in?

Before answering that question, lets take a look at what a liberal immigration policy consists of.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and virtually every other Western country embraced “liberal” immigration policies.(1) While these policies were different from each other, they had the following characteristics in common: a) more immigrants would be let in than in previous waves of immigration, b) the immigrants allowed in would be further removed ethnically and culturally from the societies they were immigrating to than in previous waves of immigration, c) this wave of immigration would be accompanied with efforts to change the country and society to accommodate the immigrants rather than with the expectation that the immigrants would assimilate into the existing society.

The governments of these countries never had popular support for any of these policies. Instead they silenced debate by loudly condemning their critics as “racists”, a tactic that was soon picked up by progressives in the media and academy.

What on earth was the purpose of all this?

It is important to remember that these policies were introduced in the era of anti-colonialism. Britain, France, and other European countries, devastated politically and economically by two World Wars, and under pressure from the new superpowers that had emerged from WWII to contend with each other for control of the world, were closing their colonial and imperial offices overseas. Progressives, who a century earlier had regarded European imperialism as a vessel to spread the blessings of modern science, technology, and reason across the globe so as to create a new and better world of the future, now saw colonialism and imperialism as being morally wrong and the cause of all the suffering and poverty in the Third World.

Against this backdrop liberal immigration looks suspiciously like a secular, collective act of penance. (2) Our countries either practiced imperialism or were established by colonists of an imperial power, therefore to make restitution, we will turn our own countries into colonies of the world. We will bring in people from all over the world and tell them they don’t have to adapt British ways to become British, Canadian ways to become Canadian, or American ways to become American. Instead we will adopt “multiculturalism” and change the definition of what it means to be British, Canadian or American, to include the newcomers.

So what exactly is the problem with this?

First of all, it involves a betrayal on the part of the governing elites of our countries, of the people whom they govern. Canada was founded in the 1860’s as a country united under a single political identity – a North American country, with a British-style parliament, under British Common Law, loyal to the British Crown. Within that unity, were a number of particular cultural societies - English Canada (English speaking, Protestant), French Canada (French speaking, Catholic), and Aboriginal Canada.

When the Liberal Party of Canada, under the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau changed Canada’s immigration policies in the 1960’s, they did not ask English Canadians if they wanted English Canada to disappear and be replaced by “multicultural Canada”. They did not ask French Canadians if they wanted French Canada to disappear and be replaced by “multicultural Canada”. French Canada is famous (or infamous depending on who you ask) for its attempts to preserve its cultural identity. English Canadians were and are no less opposed to the Liberal Party's efforts to dissolve the cultural identity of English Canada into their multicultural “mosaic”.

At this point someone might object “but shouldn't the government do what is right rather than what the majority want”? Yes it should, but we are not talking here about allowing the majority to vote away a minority's property or life. We are talking about a government dissolving its own people's cultural identity against their own wishes. This is a major betrayal on the part of government. One of the most basic purposes of government is to protect a society against foreign invaders. People who live in any given society wish to preserve its culture, traditions, religion, language, customs and ways intact for future generations. They expect foreign conquerors to try and take these things away from them and impose a foreign culture on them. It is a role of government to try and stop it. Yet in liberal immigration and multicultural policies, government has taken upon itself the role of foreign invader, towards its own society.

A second problem with liberal immigration policy is that it ignores the importance of cultural homogeneity within a society. “Diversity is our strength” the multiculturalists chant. Is it, however?

In one sense the answer is obviously yes. A society where everybody was a policeman, or where everybody was a doctor, or where everybody was a fireman, would not function very well. A society needs farmers, doctors, policeman, firemen, teachers, and people who specialize in all sorts of other work as well.

However, there are other senses in which diversity is a weakness not a strength. The story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis provides one obvious example. People need to communicate if they wish to cooperate and communication requires a common language. Language is vitally connected to culture. The national identities of continental Europe are largely distinguished by language – French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, etc. Why do we often say “England” when we mean “The United Kingdom”, which consists of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland? Because English is the language spoken there. It is through language that a people passes down to future generations the stories, songs, poems, history, and other traditions that comprise their cultural identity.

Clearly a society and a country need both unity and diversity. The question is what kind of unity and what kind of diversity? The modern progressive answer is that cultural diversity is what is needed. As we have seen above, however, the kind of cultural diversity the progressive has in mind is the diversity least likely to strengthen a society and most likely to weaken it. There is another kind of cultural diversity. Within a larger English speaking society, for example, regional and local dialects of the common tongue will develop as will local and particular variations on the common culture. This kind of cultural diversity is good for a society but it is not the product of immigration.

This brings us to our third and final objection to liberal immigration. It undermines community. Community requires more than just living in proximity to other people. Imagine six houses on both sides of a street facing each other, all occupied by families, none of whom ever socialize with the others or even know their names. Are they a community? No. To make a community out of a neighborhood requires knowing the people with whom you share sidewalks, streets, schools, playgrounds, and churches. This requires a degree of trust. The strongest communities are communities where the families have long roots, where families have lived together as neighbors for many generations.

Now a strong community will be open to newcomers. A closed community is not healthy for a number of reasons. There is a difference, however, between what happens when the son of a family long established in a community, comes back home and brings his new wife from out of town with him and what happens when a large number of families from a foreign country that nobody knows anything about or has any connections with, move into a neighborhood all at once. The latter undermines the basic sense of trust which binds the families in the neighborhood into a community. As John Derbyshire puts it:

Diversity seems to affect every kind of social connection. In places with more ethnic diversity, people have fewer friends, watch more TV, are less inclined to vote, trust local government less, and rate their personal happiness lower. (3)

Community is essential for society – and a healthy country must first be a healthy society.

To recap, the case against liberal immigration has been made on the grounds that it a) involves governments breaking faith with and betraying their own people, b) increases the wrong kind of diversity, diversity which weakens rather than strengthens a society, and c) undermines the trust needed to generate the social ties which keep communities together. (4) I will conclude by answering two objections that advocates of liberal immigration raise against restricting immigration.

The first objection is the compassion objection. “These people are just looking for a better life for themselves and their children, isn’t it cruel to turn them away?” The answer to this is that a liberal immigration policy which appears to show compassion to masses of immigrants is in fact unfair to them as individuals and families. Lets say a family is considering moving to Canada because prospects appear better for the future of their children here than in their home country. They are willing to come here, to become part of Canada, to integrate into our society, and work to better their condition and that of their children. It is easy to see how letting this family into Canada would be compassionate and would improve their circumstances without harming our country and society in any way.

Suppose however, that we admit the family, not on the merits of their own case, but as part of a flood of immigrants that are being admitted because their culture and ethnicity are different from that of Canadians, as part of a government policy designed at dissolving the traditional identities of “English Canada” and “French Canada” and replacing them with “multicultural Canada”. If we do that, then what we are saying to the hypothetical family of immigrants in this illustration, that we will admit them, but not to the Canada they were hoping to move to and become a part of. That Canada we are dissolving and tearing apart. This is not compassion. It is as unfair to prospective immigrants as it is to English Canadians and French Canadians.

The second objection is “Isn’t it racist to oppose immigration policy on the grounds that it weakens cultural homogeneity and increases diversity?” This objection is never raised in good faith but rather as an attempt to poison the well. It does not deserve an answer but I will give it one anyway.

No, it is not racist for English Canadians to want English Canada to remain English Canada. It is not racist for French Canadians to want French Canada to remain French Canada. It is not racist for the British to want the UK to remain British. It is not racist for the French to want France to remain French, or for the Germans to want Germany to remain German. It is natural and right and normal for people to form ties of loyalty to their own people and culture and society and to want their children and grandchildren to grow up and become part of the same society that they are attached to. It is immoral to accuse people of being racist for wanting these things.

“Racist” as most people understand the word, means disliking someone else because they are different from you in skin color and ethnic background. Wanting your own society to remain essentially the same is not about disliking other people and wishing them ill.

(1) In Canada, the Liberals under Pearson and Trudeau, introduced these policies in a most underhanded manner. They made a big show of bringing in the “points system” in 1967, a system which on paper looks pretty good – it awards points to prospective immigrants for knowing English and French, for education and skills, and for other things the government should be looking for in prospective immigrants. They stuck some pretty big loopholes into the system, however, and quietly relocated Canada’s visa officers to High Commissions and consulates in the Third World where they launched a recruitment campaign for immigration to Canada.

(2) In Christian theology, a repentant sinner is supposed to confess his sins and make restitution to those he has wronged if it is possible. If he has stolen something, for example, he is supposed to return it. In sacramental branches of the Christian tradition (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, etc.) the term “penance” refers to these things and an outward rite in which sins are confessed before a priest and the priest pronounces absolution (forgiveness). In lay language, however, the term “penance” is most often used in a limited sense to refer to the acts a person does to “make up” for what he has done wrong. It is in this sense that I use the term here. In chapter 2 of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward A Secular Theocracy (University of Missouri Press: Columbia and London, 2002), Dr. Paul Gottfried, the Professor of Humanites at Elizabethtown College, argues that liberal Protestantism is the religious worldview which “gives direction to the managerial state’s progress toward a therapeutic regime concerned with the self-esteem of victims” (p. 66). It is interesting therefore, to read his remarks on page 65 of that book about the absence of the sacrament of penance from the branches of Protestantism that developed into “liberal Protestantism” and about the public rituals of repentance that these churches developed to fill the vacuum.

(3) John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, (New York: Crown Forum, 2009), p. 19. This quotations is from chapter two entitled “Diversity: Nothing to Celebrate”. In this chapter, Derbyshire discusses among other things the findings of political scientist Robert Putnam regarding the impact of ethnic diversity on social capital. It is in the context of that discussion that this quotation appears. Derbyshire’s book is both informative and witty, and chapters two and ten are especially relevant to those seeking more information on the subject of this essay.

(4) Other objections could be raised, on a wide variety of grounds. Diane Francis’ book Immigration: The Economic Case (Key Porter Books: Toronto, 2002) provides economic objections to Canada’s immigration policy, for example. Last year the Fraser Institute published The Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society, a collection of essays edited by Herbert Grubel criticizing the immigration policies of Canada (primarily – there are two essays devoted to France and the United States) from a number of standpoints (economic, demographic, social, and political).