Old Canada and Young Voters

In my last essay, commenting on the results of last week’s federal election, I quoted myself as having said that it proved what I, ala Evelyn Waugh, had been saying about the queen needing a better method of selecting her ministers than popular election, and that if elected officials are to be retained in our government we need a more limited franchise. Lest anyone make the mistake of thinking this to be a partisan comment, my breakdown of the election results into the good and bad – the good being that Mulcair and Harper lost, the bad being that Trudeau won – it should be apparent that any other outcome to that election would also have supported my position.

That having been said, there are those who took umbrage with my sin against the modern dogma of the universal franchise, but I am in no way repentant over it. A broad franchise makes more sense in the context of a small group of people with very similar interests electing their local officials than it does when we are talking about the government of a large country like Canada. Most people know and understand the affairs, interests, and concerns of the local area in which they live and work much better than they do those of their country as a whole. A broader franchise, therefore, makes more sense when a town is electing its mayor and council than when a province is electing its legislature and when the country is electing its Parliament.

The past election demonstrated just how appalling the dearth in understanding of Canadian civics has become in our country. Whatever one may think of either Justin Trudeau or Stephen Harper, the results of the election show that our voters thought in terms of an American Presidential election – that they were choosing the next Prime Minister. That is not how our system works, however. We vote to form a Parliament, the elected portion of which is made up of representatives of the areas in which we live. We choose who will represent our area in the House, and in accordance with tradition and our constitution, the person who can command the most support in the House becomes Her Majesty’s next Prime Minister and forms the next government. If we understood our system better and thought in terms of who the best person to represent the interests of our riding would be rather than which party leader would make the best Prime Minister a broader franchise would more justified than it is at present.

It is not just the Trudeau supporters who show this lack of understanding but the Harper supporters as well. On the night of the election after the Trudeau victory was apparent countless numbers of irate Harper supporters began calling for Alberta and Saskatchewan to separate and form a “Republic of Western Canada”. They too were thinking entirely in terms of the country’s premiership rather than the representative of their ridings. Furthermore, their willingness to indulge in the silly sentiment of “you’re not going to play my way, I’ll take my ball and go home”, anti-patriotic, separatism that is reminiscent of nothing so much as the way left-wing Hollywood actors talk every time it looks like a Republican might win residence in the White House, shows how little they understand of the conservatism they profess to stand for. So, of course, does the suggested name for their hypothetical break-away country. As I have said before and will say again a true conservative is a monarchist not a republican.

Those who find the thought of limiting the franchise objectionable seem to have overlooked the fact that there are already limits on who can vote. You cannot, for example, vote if you are under the age of eighteen. This is a very reasonable limitation and while I have encountered people who think this is unfair and arbitrary and that the age should be lowered I would argue, myself, that it ought to be raised by a decade or two. The absurd cult of youth and its accompanying notions that we are in constant need of change and newer fresher ideas is an indicator of degeneracy and a culture and civilization gone mad. Young people think they know, if not everything, so much more than their elders, when, of course, in most cases the opposite is true. Wisdom, which is even more important than knowledge for wise statesmanship, is even rarer among youth as it is usually something that develops with age and experience.

Stephen Marche, in a recent column for the Huffington Post, maintains that “Trudeau Won Because Youth Want the Old Canada Back”. Yet if there is anything his article demonstrates it is that most youth don’t have a clue what the old Canada was. Nor, for that matter, does Marche himself. Old Canada was the British country built on a foundation of Loyalism that gradually grew up and obtained control of her own affairs within her own Parliament under the shared monarchy, within the British Empire and without severing ties to the British family of nations. Within the old Canada was an even older Canada, the French Canada that had been ceded to the British Crown after the Seven Years War, and was guaranteed her French language and culture and her Roman Catholic religion by royal decree. French Canada remained staunchly traditionalist Catholic until the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, while English Canada had a very Victorian culture and society. Anyone who wants to know what that Canada was like will find it described in the histories written by Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton, but will probably find a more meaningful encounter with old Canada in the novels of Mazo de la Roche, Lucy Maude Montgomery and Robertson Davies and in the short stories of Stephen Leacock. This is the Canada that I want back. It is not the Canada that Stephen Marche is talking about.

By “old Canada”, of course, Marche means “Canada before Harper” but the way he describes it his “old Canada” is younger than I am, going back no farther than 1982, the year in which the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed. He calls the Charter our “founding document” and suggests that a Trudeau running for Prime Minister is “not the same as a Clinton or a Bush running for President” but would be “closer to a Washington or a Jefferson”. This is truly ignorant in a most grotesque fashion. This comparison would be true of a MacDonald or a McGee, an Archibald, Brown, or Campbell, a Cartier or a Tache, but certainly not a Trudeau. If a comparison must be drawn between the Trudeau family and an American political family the most suitable name is that of Kennedy.

Marche quotes Stephen Harper as saying “You won't recognize Canada when I'm through with it”, a sentiment which demonstrates Harper to have been unworthy of the leadership of the Conservative Party but which would have been appropriate in the mouths of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau in the 1960s. For twenty-one years, with one brief intermission, the Liberal Party under the successive leadership of these men, waged a relentless war on Canada’s British and Loyalist heritage, turning a country in which people saw the Common Law protections of their basic rights and freedoms as their birthright as free subjects of the Crown, whether English speaking Protestant or French speaking Catholic, into a country that was expected to be grateful to Trudeau for the much abridged version of their rights and freedoms contained in the Charter. This was hardly an improvement.

The attack by the Pearson-Trudeau Liberals on our British traditions and institutions created a national identity crisis that has not truly been resolved since and which has generated our unhealthy national obsession with not being American. The old Canada defined itself positively rather than negatively as a British country, built on a foundation of Loyalism, that treasured its rich inheritance of parliamentary monarchy and Common Law, in which the language, religion, and culture of French Canada was recognized and protected. We did not need to obsess about what made us different from the Americans – that was obviously implicit in our retaining the identity which the Americans rejected in 1776. When Pearson and Trudeau, while keeping the outward form of our government, tried to create a Canada that no longer identified herself as British, the result was a Canada obsessed with how she is “not American”.

This has manifested itself in all sorts of foolishness in the form of declaring something to be “American”, then declaring us to be the exact opposite, usually getting both the United States and Canada completely wrong in the process. Capitalism, Christian fundamentalism, and militarism have all been declared to be “American”, therefore Canada must be socialist, secular or religiously liberal, and a country that is particularly devoted to peace. All of this, however, is utter hogwash.

The American government of the 1930s and 1940s was far friendlier to socialism, and to the USSR, than any Canadian federal government prior to 1968 ever was, and most of the “socialist” policies introduced in North America in the twentieth century were introduced by the United States first, with Canada following the American example. These include the progressive income tax (USA – 1913, Canada –1917), the New Deal (USA – 1933, Canada – 1935), and the expanded welfare state of the “Great Society”, introduced in the United States in 1964-1965 by LBJ whose presidency ended the same year the premiership of Pierre Trudeau, who brought us similar programs as part of his concept of a “Just Society”, began.

The idea that Canada is a “secular” country compared to the “fundamentalist” United States is even more absurd. It is the United States that has historically been the secular country. The idea of separation of church and state has been enshrined in the First Amendment of her Bill of Rights since 1791. In 1962 and 1963, the Supreme Court of the United States drove the Bible and prayer from public schools in America, and, Christian fundamentalists have not succeeded in restoring them since, nor in restoring the state bans on abortion struck down by SCUSA in Roe v. Wade in 1971, demonstrating that Christian fundamentalists simply do not have the clout in the United States that liberals seem to think they do. Separation of church and state has never been part of the Canadian tradition or constitution, and the Lord’s Prayer and the Bible remained in Canadian schools until the end of the 1980s. Our Supreme Court did not become an aggressively activist force on behalf of secular humanism, the way the American Supreme Court had been for decades, until Pierre Trudeau added his Charter to our constitution in 1982. Our abortion laws, passed shortly after Confederation, while liberalized somewhat by Pierre Trudeau in 1969, were not struck down completely until 1988.

In both of these cases, socialism and secularism, not only were these not characteristics of old Canada, of Canada as she was through most of her history, far from making us “different from the Americans” as ignorant liberals maintain, it was by following the example set by the United States that they were introduced to Canada.

What about militarism then? Surely Canada’s “peace-keeping” role in geo-politics is distinctive?

Justin Trudeau and his supporters have made much out of the fact that Stephen Harper’s neoconservative, sabre-rattling is a radical departure from Canada’s tradition, which it was, but they ignore the fact that the “peace-keeping” role they look back to was itself a relatively recent break from Canada’s tradition, and one which, ironically, has the same ultimate origins as Harper’s neoconservatism, in the United States. All American foreign policy since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt has been one version or another of Wilsonianism, the policies of the American President who led the United States into the First World War, Woodrow Wilson. The idea is basically that of a global association of states, led by the United States, which would police the world, protecting the rights of small nations, and “making the world safe for democracy”. Versions of this differ depending upon how large of a role is envisioned for the United States, whether democracy was to be spread or merely protected where it developed on its own, and other such considerations, but if Stephen Harper’s approach is a Canadianized version of the version of Wilsonianism that has been favoured by the Republican Party for the last three decades – neoconservatism, Lester Pearson’s concept of peace-keeping was no less Wilsonian in nature and American in origin.

Lester Pearson won his Nobel Peace Prize, for his efforts as Minister of External Affairs under Louis St. Laurent, in the formation of the United Nations Emergency Force and the resolution of the Suez Crisis in 1956. Hopefully, he received his thirty pieces of silver alongside his medal, for the outcome he worked for was a complete betrayal of everything Canada had traditionally stood for. In response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal by the Soviet-backed Egyptian regime of General Nasser, Israel, Great Britain, and France invaded Egypt with the intention of recapturing the canal and toppling the Nasser regime. American President Dwight Eisenhower demanded that Britain, France, and Israel withdraw. Pearson had been working towards the creation of the first United Nations Emergency Force, in which troops from countries not directly involved in the conflict would, under the aegis of the United Nations, police the area and enforce the ceasefire. This brought about the de-escalation of the situation, but at the cost of the humiliation of Britain and France, accomplishing the ends of President Eisenhower who wished it to be clear that the USA and the USSR were now the true world powers.

Young people today, who have been indoctrinated by Liberal dominated public schools into thinking of Pearson’s “peacekeeping” as our traditional role in world affairs, simply don’t realize what a drastic break from Canada’s true military tradition this was. Canadians at the time did – which was a significant contribution to the Liberals being voted out and John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives being voted in in 1957.

Do you recall what Canadians used to honour most in the history of our nation? I do. It was the way that our forebears, even before the Dominion of Canada came together in Confederation, had, along with the British army, successfully fought off the invasion of American “liberators” in the War of 1812. It was the way Canadian troops had proved themselves on the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme, at Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge, in World War I. It was the way Canada declared war on Germany on September 10, 1939 – exactly one week after Great Britain had – the delay, to honour the fact that since the Statute of Westminster of 1931 our own Parliament determined when and if we were to go to war, the declaration because we knew that in such a conflict, our place was by Britain’s side. It was the way our men had again fought honourably in the noble cause of king and country, at Dieppe and in Hong Kong, in Sicily and on the Atlantic, at Juno Beach in Normandy and in the liberation of the Netherlands.

It was not just by promoting a UN solution to the Suez Crisis that achieved the ends of the United States – and Soviet Union – at the expense of the humiliation of Britain, that Pearson broke with Canada’s older, longer, and more honourable, military tradition. When as Prime Minister he brought in the Maple Leaf flag in 1965, a flag that represents the Liberal Party far more than it does Canada as a country, it was to replace the Canadian Red Ensign which had been made our official flag by order-in-council on September 5, 1945, three days after the formal surrender of Japan ended the conflict in which over a million Canadians had fought under that flag, and over forty-two thousand lost their lives. The replacement of that flag, was a disgraceful insult to those men.

By the end of World War II, Canada had the fourth largest air force and the fifth largest navy in the world. Our armed forces shrunk considerably under the Pearson and Trudeau premierships, during which they were deployed mostly on peacekeeping missions for the UN. This was as much in service of American foreign policy as Stephen Harper’s later, more belligerent, approach was. Don’t let the rhetoric of the UN General Assembly, full of the worst sort of leftist anti-Americanism, fool you. The peacekeepers answer to the Security Council, which ordinarily plays the tune called by the United States, and Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau were well aware of this fact. The new peacekeeping role they envisioned for Canada allowed them to have their cake and eat it too. They could meet Canada’s minimal commitments to the American-led alliances to which we belong, while engaging in verbal abuse of the United States on par with that of any Third World kleptocrat with a seat at the General Assembly. Furthermore, they could claim to be building a Canada full of “caring” and “compassion” because instead of maintaining our military, one of the basic essential functions of a government, they were able to spend more of our tax dollars on other projects. Like propping up the failed governments of wealthy Third World dictators and calling it relief for the poor, replacing Canadians with thousands of Third World immigrants, and establishing a federal kangaroo court authorized, in complete violation of our traditional understanding of justice, to investigate accusations of thought crime (discrimination) that come with stiff penalties and where the onus of proof is on the accused.

Young Canadians may want the “old” Canada of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau back, but I for one want the older Canada of Sir John A. MacDonald and John Diefenbaker. The fact that young Canadians seem largely unaware of the latter and are so easily duped by the myths of the former, just goes to show that the voting franchise should be entrusted to those who have acquired wisdom through age, and not to the young, idealistic, and utterly ignorant.

The Circus is Over

The circus that was the Canadian federal election of 2015 is finally over. My response, upon hearing the results, first posted at Free Dominion at 10:24 CST last night was to say:

The projected results of this election, as they stand right now, just go to prove what I, ala Evelyn Waugh, have been saying for some time now - the Queen needs a better method of selecting her ministers than popular election. If we absolutely must have elected officials, then we need a more limited franchise. At least 75% of the current electorate don't deserve the vote and shouldn't have it. The real percentage is probably closer to 95%.

At a future date, we may explore the idea of limiting the franchise at greater length. Now back to the election.

The Liberal Party, headed by Justin Trudeau, has won a majority of 184 seats. The Conservatives, who won a majority in 2011, have been reduced to 99 seats, making them Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The NDP, who were the official opposition during the last government, have been reduced to 44 seats, the Bloc Quebecois are at 10 seats, and the Green Party has a single seat which I assume to be that of its leader Elizabeth May.

The outcome is a mix of the good and the bad. We will briefly consider the good, before looking at what is bad in all of this.

That the far-left NDP, which at one time looked like it might win the election, has been reduced to 44 seats from 103 can only be regarded as a good thing. The NDP was dedicated to the destruction of Canada’s traditional, mixed, constitution. It had vowed to eliminate the Senate, and in response to the Monarchist League of Canada’s question, sent out to all parties earlier this year of whether they and their leader “support the continuance of the constitutional monarchy as Canada's form of governance?” were the only party to give an evasive answer, the three others stating their support for the continuance of the monarchy. The leader of the NDP, Thomas Mulcair, is a man who, displaying an astonishing lack of perspective, simultaneously demanded that Omar Khadr be brought back into Canada and that Conrad Black be kept out. He has also declared that nobody who opposes abortion will ever be allowed to run for the NDP and that the issue should not be open for debate and that evangelical Christians are “un-Canadian”. That he will not be Prime Minister or even leader of the opposition is a blessing. That Pat Martin, the obnoxious jerk who served as NDP incumbent in my constituency of Winnipeg Centre, has finally been ousted, is icing on that cake.

It must also be counted as for the good that Stephen Harper has resigned the leadership of the Conservative Party following his defeat. The party had been in need of a new leader for some time now. Without denying the good that has been accomplished on his watch, such as the abolition of the long-gun registry and the restoration of the “Royal” designation of our Navy and Air Force, the greatest achievement of the Conservative government, the scrapping of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, was brought about by a private member’s bill without Harper’s support and overall he has been a disappointment as a Conservative leader. His courting of the votes of social conservatives while refusing to do anything to halt or reverse the social and moral decay of the country is one example, his Yankee style neoconservative approach to foreign policy coupled with his ludicrous inversion of Teddy Roosevelt’s proverb “speak softly and carry a big stick”, is another. His government’s countless attempts to police Canadians thoughts and words on the internet, culminating in this year’s Bill C-51 was the last straw for me as far as ever voting for the party again while it remained under his leadership was concerned.

Worst of all, however, was his cuckservatism. If you are not familiar with that expression, is has recently become popular in altright, neoreactionary, and other right-wing movements outside of established mainstream conservatism to refer to the tendency, within the latter, to embrace multiculturalism, Third World immigration, political correctness, feminism, and basically the left-wing “rainbow strategy” of appealing to the interests of everyone except whites, Christians, heterosexuals, males and especially all of these combined. Stephen Harper was and is the quintessential Canadian cuckservative, despite the ridiculous efforts of the left-wing parties and media to portray him as a rabid, xenophobic, racist, bigot. Unfortunately, the man who many believe to be the likely next leader of the party, indeed the first name mentioned by Steven Chase in his look at the question of who will succeed Harper for the Globe and Mail, Jason Kenney, is just as much a cuckservative as he is. As Immigration Minister and Minister for Multiculturalism, the only people he seemed to be interested in banning from the country were controversial speakers, whether of the left, like British Labour MP George Galloway, or the right, like Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles Magazine. Worse, he was determined to suppress dissent on the part of Canadians to multiculturalism and mass immigration. As Kevin Michael Grace put it in a 2010 article that demonstrates just how much of a cuckservative Kenney is:

Kenney remains ever vigilant in his search for (secular) heresies.So anyone who criticizes his and Harper`s bemusing obsession with Israel is an "anti-Semite",while anyone who criticizes immigration is a "racist."

Harper’s resignation as Conservative leader, then, must be chalked up on the side of the good that has come out of this election, with the qualification that his successor as leader may end up being as bad as or worse than he is.

The bad side of the outcome of this election is, of course, that Justin Trudeau will now be Prime Minister of Canada with a larger majority behind him than Stephen Harper had for the last four years. If I had my druthers the entire Trudeau family would be permanently banned from ever holding any position of influence in Canada. Justin’s father was the detestable Pierre Elliott Trudeau. An admirer of Red Chinese tyrant Mao Tse-Tung and virtually every tin-pot dictator the Third World ever produced, Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada in 1968. With the exception of a half-year span in which Joe Clark had a minority Conservative government, he was Prime Minister until mid-way through 1984. During that time he completed the “revolution within the form” that Lester Pearson had begun with the changing of Canada’s flag in 1965. In 1969 he legalized homosexuality and in certain circumstances abortion, and began relocating the visa offices to which prospective immigrants then had to go to apply to immigrate to Canada to Third World countries, with the deliberate intention of altering the ethnic makeup of the country. In 1970, he began the war on freedom of thought in Canada by adding the hate propaganda provisions to the Criminal Code and in 1971 declared Canada to be officially multicultural, which meant that from then on Canada would adapt to immigrants rather than expect them to adapt to Canada. In 1977 he introduced the Canadian Human Rights Act, which attacked and undermined Canadians’ traditional freedoms of speech and association, and in 1982, when the Constitution was repatriated to Canada, the culmination of his revolution was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Ever since 1982 the Liberal Party has arrogantly taken credit for giving Canadians the rights and freedoms listed in that foul document, but the only things in the Charter that are worth more than the ink they are written in, the fundamental freedoms listed in section two, and the basic legal rights listed in sections seven through fourteen, Canadians already possessed as their heritage under Common Law as free subjects of Her Majesty. Indeed, Canadians were much freer before the Charter than after, because before 1982 we were brought up to think of ourselves as free to do whatever was not specifically prohibited by law. Since 1982 we have been told to think of our freedoms as those which are specifically defined as such in the Charter. Furthermore, the Charter makes these freedoms and rights less secure than they were before, because section thirty three of the Charter gives the federal and provincial governments the right to pass legislation that violates these rights and freedoms provided it is only temporary. No such exception is made for the sections of the Charter that enshrine multiculturalism, feminism, and bilingualism into our Constitution.

The consequences of the Charter’s making multiculturalism, feminism, and bilingualism inviable, while allowing the government to trample all over the freedoms and rights that are our birthright as free subjects of the Crown, soon became apparent. It turned the Supreme Court of Canada into the instrument of cultural revolution that the American Supreme Court had already been for decades. The ruling in the Singh decision of 1985, which made it next to impossible to deport anyone who claimed refugee status, no matter how obviously bogus the claim, and the ruling in R. v. Morganthaler in 1988 that struck down all existing laws against abortion, are among the examples of Charter based Supreme Court decisions that have radically transformed the country.

All of this is what Justin Trudeau and his supporters proudly look to as their legacy. This is to say nothing of the way Pierre Trudeau courted the good opinion of every Third World shithole while alienating other Western countries, ran Canada heavily into debt, jacked up our taxes, drove inflation through the roof while ruining the economy with heavy-handed statist mismanagement, and turned regional dissatisfaction in both Quebec and the Western provinces into separatist movements that continued to threaten to tear the country apart long after he stepped down from power.

Justin Trudeau gives every indication of being cut from the same cloth as his father. His father was an admirer of Mao, and he expressed admiration for Red China’s dictatorship at a ladies’ fundraiser in Toronto in 2013. His father made abortion legal in cases where three doctors agreed that the mother’s life was in danger, he made the pro-choice position the Liberal party line and told his MPs that they were expected to vote pro-choice on all relevant bills. His father began the browning of Canada by moving our visa officers to our Third World embassies and by allowing the family class of sponsored immigrants to bypass the points system. Justin has promised to eliminate visa requirements for Mexican citizens coming to Canada and to “expand Canada’s intake of refugees from Syria by 25,000 through immediate government sponsorship”, to help private sponsors bring even more in, and to spend $250 million extorted from the Canadian taxpayer to do so. He has promised to continue the moral and intellectual degradation of this country by legalizing marijuana.

Justin Trudeau has accused the previous government of practising “the politics of fear” in its response to Islamic terrorism, but he himself supported the worst of Harper’s anti-terrorism bills, Bill C-51. In fact, the practice of overreacting to terrorism in a way that infringes on the rights and freedoms of ordinary Canadians, goes back to the premiership of his father who invoked the War Measures Act to deal with the FLQ in 1970. In 2001 the Liberal government of Jean Chretien passed anti-terrorist legislation of which the only significant difference with Bill C-51 was that it was set to expire in five years in accordance with the provisions of the notwithstanding clause. As far as the "politics of fear" goes, how else could one describe the way the Trudeau Liberals exploited a completely unrealistic fear of a Canadian revival of Hitlerism and encouraged Canadians to suspect their neighbours and countrymen of harbouring neo-nazi sentiments, in order to discourage dissent from their dogma of egalitarian multiculturalism, thus creating the "political correctness" that has chilled the atmosphere of public debate for the last three decades or so?

Like his father before him, Justin Trudeau has been swept into office by the machinery of the organized media that has endowed him with celebrity status and duped a gullible public into accepting glitter as gold. Let us hope that the second Trudeaumania does not last as long as the first.

The Election Issue That Wasn't

On October 19th Canadians will be voting in our next federal election. In accordance with our established tradition the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons will be asked to form Her Majesty’s next government and its leader will become our next Prime Minister. Several issues have been raised in the unusually long election campaign but, as in all previous elections of the last several decades, there is one issue that has not been raised despite its being of paramount importance.

That issue is immigration. It is not an election issue for the same reason it has not been an election issue in previous elections – no party dares raise the issue for fear of being labelled racist. The fear is a well-founded one because ever since the Liberal Party introduced our present system of immigration in the 1960s our public broadcaster, the CBC, and the private media companies that, thanks to broadcast regulation agency the CRTC, are more echo chambers of the CBC than its competitors, have all levelled that accusation against anyone and everyone who dares point out the flaws in that system.

Wait a moment, you might be saying, hasn’t immigration become an election issue through the Syrian refugee crisis and the death of Alan Kurdi.

No it has not. The leaders of all the parties have tried to turn Kurdi’s death into political capital by promising to resettle large numbers of Syrian refugees here or by accusing the present government of heartlessness and a lack of compassion in its response to the crisis, but nobody has raised the question of the flaws in our refugee policy which is itself only a part of our immigration and refugee system as a whole. Indeed, most accusations that have been made against the present government’s refugee policy condemn its strengths rather than its weaknesses. Our government is responsible, first and foremost, for the good of our own country and viewed from that light, the present government’s policy of giving precedence to refugee applications from groups that have been targeted by ISIS for persecution over the co-religionists of ISIS is basic sense. Only a deranged crackpot would think that it is more important for the government not to discriminate in its processing of refugee applications than for it to attempt to ensure that those it lets in are not agents of the group that is turning people into refugees overseas.

Thirteen years ago Daniel Stoffman addressed the real problems with the way we take in refugees in the seventh chapter of his book Who Gets In (1). He pointed out that there are two kinds of refugees whose applications we approve – those we find in refugee camps overseas, and those who show up here claiming to be refugees. The latter outnumber the former by far and, despite the fact that only a small percentage of this kind are really fleeing for their lives and of these most have arrived at a safe place already before coming here, we approve the vast majority of these applications. The absurdity of this can be seen in all those we have accepted as “refugees” who return to the country where their lives are supposedly at risk for visits and vacations. Stoffman explained the problem by saying that the Immigration and Refugee Board has a preference for those who come here to claim refugee status over those we find in refugee camps because the former are the bread and butter of immigration lawyers, consultants, and the IRB itself. The really ugly side of this is that most of the funds allocated to help refugees each year do not go to actual refugees.

The IRB was a creation of the Mulroney government in 1989. It is only one of the problems with our immigration system. The Immigration Act passed by the Trudeau government in 1976 requires the government to set a target for the number of immigrants it hopes to bring in each year. A target is not the same thing as a cap. A target says the government’s goal is to bring this number of immigrants in each year, a cap says that the government will only accept up to this number of immigrants each year, no more. Under ordinary circumstance setting a cap is more sensible than setting a target.

After the annual target became required, for about ten years it varied yearly in accordance with the economic conditions in Canada. Then, in 1986, the Mulroney government raised the target to the unprecedentedly high number of 250 000. It remained that high for the duration of Mulroney’s premiership, no longer tied to our fluctuating economic conditions and needs. When Chretien came to power he jacked the target up even higher to one percent of Canada’s population which would have been just over 300 000. (2) The target for this year is between 260 000 and 285 000.

At no point did any of these governments go to the electorate and ask for a popular mandate for setting immigration levels so high. They would not have received one had they done so. Opinion polls have fairly consistently shown that most Canadians think immigration levels are too high, that the government needs to do a better job of policing who gets in, and that immigration should not be allowed to radically alter the country's demographics.

Now just to be clear on this point, it is not always wrong for a government to go against the wishes of the majority. Contra modern democratic ideology, it is to accomplish the common good and not the will of the people that governments are established. As an old-fashioned Tory I would insist that where the common good and the will of the people are in conflict the government should seek the former and ignore the latter. There is a rather obvious reason, however, why this does not apply in this case.

Since the end of the post-World War II baby boom, fertility in Canada as in other Western countries have dropped below the level required for population replenishment and has remained low since. While this is part of the reason the Mulroney, Chretien, and Harper governments have kept immigration high – to keep the numbers of the taxpaying workforce up for economic and fiscal reasons – the combination of low fertility and high immigration over an extended period adds up to a policy of population replacement. Left-wing German poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht, in his poem “The Solution”, a commentary on the East German government’s use of force to crush an uprising in 1953, wrote:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

This is what a policy of using immigration to make up for low fertility does. Which is why such a policy ought to be brought before the electorate. While the modern idea of the will of the people is a deadly and dangerous “armed doctrine” the people certainly have a right to be consulted about their own replacement and when elected officials and bureaucrats seek to replace Her Majesty’s freeborn subjects without their consent they are working against, not for, the common good.

To dissolve the old people and elect a new one was clearly the intention of the Liberal governments that comprehensively overhauled our immigration system in the 1960s and ‘70s. When, in 1967, the Pearson government passed the Immigration Act that introduced the present system in which those applying to immigrate to Canada are awarded points towards their acceptance based upon such things as their education and ability to speak English or French, they and their supporters in the media and academia declared it to be a “fair” system. The older immigration policy that had prevailed since Confederation under Conservative and Liberal governments alike, of encouraging immigration when needed but only such immigration as would not radically alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the country, they declared to be racist. Their own policy, however, was not as race-neutral as they made it appear to be on paper.

At the time, prospective immigrants were required to apply from outside Canada. Their applications would be processed by our visa officers stationed in our consulates and High Commissions. After Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada in 1968, he “began the quiet transfer of visa offices from traditional source countries to the Third World”. (3) In 1976 the Trudeau government passed an Immigration Act that came into effect in 1978 and which created different classes of immigrants, allowing those sponsored by relatives already in Canada to bypass the points system. Since Third World families tend to be much larger than those in traditional source countries the combined effect of Trudeau’s actions has been a radical transformation of the ethnic composition of Canada’s large cities where most of the immigrants settle.

There is no way this result could have been anything other than intentional. Furthermore, it is far more indefensibly racist than our original immigration policy was. In a sane day and age, a government would not be required to justify a policy aimed at keeping its country’s ethnic makeup the same. It is the government that seeks to change it that should be made to give account for its actions. To deliberately set out to change your country’s ethnic composition is to commit a form of aggression against your own people.

The only way this matter will ever be brought to a vote is if one of the parties breaks with the consensus of the others and makes it an election issue. Despite there being plenty of reasons for the Conservative, New Democrat, and Green parties to do so, none seem to possess courage enough to weather the accusations of racism that would come their way if they did, and so immigration remains the election issue that wasn’t.



(1) Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What’s wrong with Canada’s immigration program – and how to fix it. (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002), pp. 151-174.
(2) The Liberals claimed in their 1993 “Red Book” that the target had already been one percent of the population for the previous decade. Charles M. Campbell demonstrated this to be untrue in Betrayal & Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration (West Vancouver: Jasmine Books, 2000), pp. 13-14.
(3) Ibid., p. 7.

Fighting the Invasion in Fiction: A Comparison Between C. S. Lewis and Jean Raspail

C. S. Lewis, the Oxford and Cambridge professor who wrote several works of fiction and non-fiction, is mostly remembered as an author for his novels. These, like his works of non-fiction, articulated and defended Christian truth. The most popular of these are the seven novel fantasy series for young readers in which children from England have adventures in a magical world called Narnia. The BBC adapted the first four of these for television in the 1980s and Walden Media produced the first three of them as big screen films starting with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005. Another company is currently working on the fourth.

Both sets of adaptations followed the order in which the books were originally published. Had the BBC continued the series The Horse and His Boy would have been next. It is highly unlikely that any movie company would be willing to make a movie version of this and if, by chance, one were to do so, the original story would almost certainly be unrecognizable in the film.

In this underrated novel, first published in 1954, the Tisroc, ruler of Calormen, a desert country populated by turban-wearing, scimitar-wielding people of dark complexion plots the conquest of Narnia and Archenland with his heir Prince Rabadash who desires to make Narnia’s Queen Susan his bride by force. Narnia and Archenland, situated to the northwest of Calormen, are free countries, populated by talking animals, magical and mythological creatures of various sorts, and governed by people of light skin and fair complexion. Narnia and Archenland are loyal to Aslan the Lion, while Calormen is an idol worshipping land, the chief idol of which is the demon Tash. The title characters are Bree, a Narnian talking horse, and Shasta, a highborn Archenlander boy. Both were captured and taken to Calormen when very young and are now attempting to flee to the lands of their birth. They join forces with Aravis, a Calormene princess who for reasons of her own is trying to escape her own country, and her talking mare Hwin. When they discover the Tisroc’s plot, their escape attempt becomes a race to keep ahead of Rabadash’s army so as to warn Narnia and Archenland in time.

For obvious reasons The Horse and His Boy is not going to win any awards for political correctness. It is interesting to compare and contrast this book with The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. The original French edition of this latter volume came out nineteen years after The Horse and His Boy was first published. The largest similarity between the two is that in both, civilized, free lands with light-skinned people are threatened with invasion from lands to their southeast populated by dark-skinned people. There is a major difference in how the story turns out, however. At the risk of giving away the endings to both books, in The Horse and His Boy Shasta succeeds in his mission, the forces of Narnia and Archenland defeat the invaders, and Rabadash receives his comeuppance, but in The Camp of the Saints, Western civilization succumbs to the invasion and disappears.

Some might explain the significance of this difference as being that between an optimistic and a pessimistic outlook, others that it is the difference between an idealistic and a realistic outlook. I suggest that the real significance is that it is a difference in how the real world in which we live is meant to be reflected in the fictional worlds of the two novels. Narnia is a world of the imagination, the France of The Camp of the Saints is a fictional version of the France in our world. This, of course, means that Narnia is a step further removed from our real world, but it is nevertheless the case that Lewis intended for us to see truths about our world through the imaginary world he has portrayed for us. In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, we are obviously intended to see the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in that of the Lion Aslan.

To the extent that the Narnia and Archenland of Lewis’ imaginary world reflect the Western Civilization – or better yet, Christendom – of our world, they are pictures of our past, inspired by history. When the early Islamic Caliphate sought to conquer Europe, and the forces of Abd-er-Rahman were decisively defeated by Charles Martel’s Franks in the Battle of Poitiers in 732 AD and when the Ottoman Turks marched against the Holy Roman Empire to be defeated before the gates of Vienna in 1683 AD – these historical events from our world have an echo in the defeat of Rabadash in the world of Narnia.

It is a different episode of history that is fictionally re-enacted in Raspail’s novel. When, at the end of the story, Western Civilization has been reduced to twenty faithful defenders besieged in a small village overlooking the Riviera, among them are a Constantine Dragasès and a Luke Notaras – the names of the last Byzantine Emperor and his military commander when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 AD. The vision of our world that we are presented with in The Camp of the Saints, is not of our past but of what, at the time, was a possible future, one in which all of Western Christendom falls as Constantinople did.

Today, the novel reads not so much as a picture of a possible future but of an all too real present. Much of it is coming true before our very eyes. Minister Jean Orelle’s press conference in chapter seventeen, in which he announces that France is ready and willing to “assume the humanitarian obligations incumbent upon all men of good will in these truly unprecedented times” by taking in the migrants from India, and “asks only one thing…that she not stand alone” has taken on flesh in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s throwing open Germany’s borders to the migrants claiming to be Syrian refugees, while expecting other European countries to help cover the cost of her compassion. The media’s one-sidedness, dishonest coverage, and emotional manipulation have been so close to what Raspail described that one can almost hear Albert Durfort telling us “we are all from Kurdistan now”.

Sadly, the church too has been behaving as if Raspail’s novel were a script to follow. Pope Francis’ lecture to the American Congress last week sounded like it was lifted from the papal Good Friday address in the thirty-third chapter of the book. The Protestant churches are behaving no better. Virtually every official ecclesiastical statement on the “refugee crisis” conveys an attitude of “we are rich and they are poor therefore we need to bend over and take it” that is enough to make one vomit. It comes straight out of the pages of The Camp of the Saints.

In The Camp of the Saints, Raspail depicts a church that is walking around after it is already dead. Corrupted by liberalism and leftism, her clergy have abandoned her old ways, traditions, and faith and her people have abandoned their churches. When the Ganges fleet approaches the Suez canal the Muslim world take to their mosques and call upon Allah. Raspail’s narrator muses about what would have happened if the people of Europe had returned to their churches and begun to call upon God in earnest once more. Only twelve Benedictine monks are faithful to the old ways and march to the sea carrying the Blessed Sacrament in the hope that it will repel the invaders. These are all that remain of the religion that moved men like Charles Martel and Jan Sobieski to take up arms and fight off the invaders of Christendom in the past.

The spirit of that religion, or at least of its fictional otherworldly counterpart, is alive and well in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia which is why, when Shasta arrives in the nick of time, King Lune of Archenland does not then sit down with Lord Darrin to discuss the ways in which they can make Rabadash and the Calormenes welcome, but instead sets about defending his castle and fighting off the invading army.

In Lewis’ novel, the invaders come on horseback armed with swords. In Raspail’s novel, and in real life today, they come armed with their own poverty and seemingly desperate conditions, which are much harder weapons to fight against as they are effectively designed to penetrate our defences and hit us where we are weak. We will never be able to fight such a weapon unless we recover the old-fashioned Christianity of C. S. Lewis, with its fighting spirit and will to live and abandon the sappy, liberalism that has taken its place, that apologizes for the Crusades, and embraces the cultural and ethnic death of the peoples of the West and their civilization.

Abounding Ironies

When the image of the drowned body of three year old Alan Kurdi was broadcast around the world to feed the eyes of voyeurs of compassion everywhere, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau, who as leaders of the NDP and Liberals respectively were already competing against each other for the Canadian premiership in this fall’s federal election, immediately started up a second contest as to who could shed the most tears, point the most fingers of blame at the present Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Immigration Minister Christopher Alexander, and promise to bring in the largest number of people claiming to be refugees from the Syrian civil war.

As comforting as it is to know that the men who want to be trusted with the job of leading Her Majesty’s next government in Ottawa hold the lives of young children so close to their hearts and are so visibly upset at the untimely death of one of them, this must surely leave many of us with a sense of puzzlement. For while Kurdi’s death, an accident caused primarily by the actions of his own father, could in no way have been prevented by the Canadian government there are almost 100, 000 deaths of children even younger that take place in Canada each year which are both deliberate and preventable, yet which Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau have both insisted they will neither prevent nor allow anyone else to prevent.

In 2013, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, there were 82, 869 induced abortions in Canada. The year before that there had been 83, 708, and the number had been in the ninety thousands for the five preceding years. These statistics, while official, are acknowledged to be low, because some kinds of abortions are omitted. Canada has had no laws restricting abortion since the Supreme Court’s 1988 ruling in R v. Morgantaler to strike down all existing abortion laws.

This absence of laws prohibiting or even restricting a procedure that deliberately terminates the lives of the next generation before they are even born is an indefensible and, indeed, reprehensible, state of affairs and yet, Mr. Trudeau last spring declared that those who wish to run as candidates for the Liberal Party in future federal elections must agree with the party line on abortion. Pro-life Liberal MPs already seated, he added, would be grandfathered in and allowed to run again, provided they supported the party’s position when it came to voting. Even this was regarded as a horrible compromise by Thomas Mulcair, who declared in response that no NDP candidate now or in the future “will ever vote against a woman's right to choose.” Indeed, the staunchly anti-life Mulcair insisted that “No one will be allowed to run for the NDP if they don’t believe that it is a right in our society for women to make their own choices on their reproductive health. Period.”

So the accidental death of a three year half a world away that could not have been prevented by our government is cause to wring our hands, put on sackcloth, and heap ashes on our heads as we loudly lament our hardheartedness which had nothing to do with the boy’s death, and throw caution to the winds in opening our borders to tens of thousands of people claiming asylum, regardless of whether they are actual refugees or the jihadists who are turning their own countrymen into refugees in the first place, but the deliberate termination of the lives of our next generation is a woman’s “right” which must be treated as sacred and not interfered with? It is a sad symptom of the spiritual illness that is devastating our country that these two ding-a-lings are electable even as representatives of their own constituencies, let alone potential Prime Ministers.

Earlier this year, when it was reported that pro-life groups were distributing fliers that put Justin Trudeau’s face next to that of an aborted fetus, Liberal health critic Hedy Fry was quoted as saying:

These flyers are incredibly graphic in nature, and regardless of individual positions on abortion, many Canadians are understandably upset that this group has exposed their children to these disturbing images.

You know what other disturbing image is incredibly graphic in nature? The image of Alan Kurdi lying dead on a beach. I wonder if the Vancouver Centre representative who as Chretien’s Minister of Multiculturalism was forced to apologize fourteen years ago for having stuck her foot in her mouth with a ludicrously absurd remark about how in Prince George “crosses are being burned on lawns as we speak” would have the same objection to the much wider distribution of that image.

Both Trudeau and Mulcair express the indefensible position of their parties on abortion in terms of “women’s right to choose.” The matter of abortion, they have declared, should not be reopened. It is easy to see why they think so. If the issue were reopened they would have to explain why women should have the right to choose to pervert their natural, maternal instincts by having innocent human lives that are utterly dependent upon them terminated. A healthy society allows for the deliberate taking of human life only when it is done in self-defence, when it is imposed as a penalty by a lawfully constituted court for a capital offence, and when done to the enemies of queen and country, nation and homeland, in time of war. Otherwise it is murder. If a man were to come home, find his wife in bed with someone else, and kill the both of them in a fit of passionate rage, his act of murder would be more understandable and defensible than that of a mother, who against her natural instinct to love, protect, and nurture the life growing in her, decides in cold blood to terminate her pregnancy. We would, nevertheless, still arrest that man, convict him of murder, and lock him up in prison. If we do not, shame on us. An even greater shame on us if we do not put a stop to this holocaust in which our unborn future generations are being offered up as sacrifices to the Moloch of sex equality.

The thousands of abortions that take place in Canada every year, along with the effective new contraceptive technology that sparked the second wave of the sexual egalitarian movement about six decades ago, have contributed significantly to the extended period of low fertility that we have experienced in recent decades which our government has used to justify an equally extended period of high immigration. The government’s rationale is economic, based upon the need to keep the tax-paying population from shrinking too drastically, but from the point of view of the national good it is suicidal, for no country can survive that sacrifices its continuity of identity by replacing rather than reproducing its population. That it has been going on so long makes it all the more reckless to consider taking in this new wave of migrants by the tens of thousands.

The ultimate irony, in all of this, is that Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau, if they manage to flood the country with tens of thousands of migrants, may very well end up slaying the pagan goddess of sex equality or women’s rights for whom they have abandoned and betrayed the true and living God of their nominal Catholic faith. Or perhaps, since it was worship at her altar that brought about the low fertility that started the chain of events that has brought us to the place where we might be overwhelmed by these migrants, it might be more appropriate to adapt a line of Hamlet's and say she will be hoist with her own petard. For these migrants are mostly Muslims, and if we let them in in such numbers and so indiscriminately that we end up adapting to them rather than the other way around, her temple will soon fall.

Pictures and Words

It is said that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and, like most familiar adages, there is much truth in this statement. A single picture is capable of conveying, instantly and powerfully, what it might take a long time and many words to get across verbally. Furthermore, pictures have the ability to speak to the emotions with a voice which drowns out that of the rational argument which speaks only to the intellect.

Pictures, therefore, are dangerous weapons in the wrong hands, for, like words, they can convey falsehoods as well as truths. Moreover, a lie spoken through a picture can have a lasting impact even after it has been exposed and that impact can be stronger than the words through which the truth is revealed.

The media recently treated us to an example of this as they splashed across our television and computer screens and the front pages of our newspapers the image of the body of a drowned, three year old boy, lying dead on a Turkish beach. Virtually every detail of the story that accompanied this image, even down to the name of the boy as initially reported, has subsequently been demonstrated to be at least partially false, yet its emotional impact continues to linger on, exerting a baleful influence on the Western world’s response to the flood of migration from the Middle East and Africa. Due to the sheer numbers involved, the situation calls for realism, cool heads, and long-term thinking, but instead, thanks to this picture, we are getting grandstanding gestures, reeking of sentimentality.

The death of a three year old is a terrible thing, of course, but it is not ordinarily world news, much less world changing news. The purpose of the highlighting of this story by the world media was to present a message, not about the boy himself, but about the wave of migration that is being called a refugee crisis. That message is that thousands of people, displaced by the war in Syria, will die like this young toddler, unless taken in by the countries of the West, as the victims both of the war and of Western heartlessness.

That is the message carried by the first stories that accompanied the image and which, due to the law of first impressions, is the message that endures, regardless of the countless subsequent retractions of the details of the initial reporting. This is a media technique that Professor Bruce Charlton calls “first-strike framing” in his recent book Addicted to Distraction.

There has been plenty the media have had to retract, or at the very least, redact, about this story. Whatever else Alan Kurdi might be a victim of, he is not a victim of either the war in Syria or Western heartlessness. His family had fled ISIS in Syria, yes, but they were already living in safety in Turkey. Nor, as it turns out, had they been turned away by the Canadian Ministry of Immigration, for, contrary to the initial claims of the father and aunt of the boy, the only application that had been filed had been for the boy’s uncle, Mohammed. Yet even if such an application had been filed and rejected, it could scarcely have contributed to the death of the boy, whose destination on this ill-fated boat trip was not Canada, but the Greek island of Kos. Indeed, from the testimony of the other survivors, it is apparent that the responsibility for the boy’s death falls squarely on his father, Abdullah, who has been using the soapbox the world media gave him to point fingers at everyone but himself. According to these other survivors he is a people smuggler and was driving the boat himself when it capsized.

Just as the story about the Kurdi family does not bear up under scrutiny, neither does the larger narrative about the so-called refugee crisis. While undoubtedly many genuine refugees have been created as people have been dispossessed and displaced by the war between the rebels and the Assad government in Syria, especially after the creation of ISIS and the wave of religious persecution that ensued, there is a world of difference between those who have fled to Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey to escape immediate danger and persecution, and the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions, flooding into Europe across the Mediterranean. To accept these indiscriminately, as the media, humanitarian organizations, leftist politicians, and bleeding heart clergymen demand, without making the vital distinctions between a true refugee and a migrant, and between a migrant and an invader, could only destroy our own countries while doing no good for real refugees as we would be letting in the kind of people they are fleeing from along with them and potentially recreating the conditions from which they are trying to escape in our own countries.

According to statistics gathered by the European Union, only about a fifth of those pouring into Europe are actually from Syria. Even more significantly, almost three quarters of these are men. Whatever their country of origin, it is from safe locations to which they have already arrived that they are flooding into Europe. All the evidence points to the conclusion that, contrary to the media narrative, what we are seeing is not the kind of emergency situation that demands a humanitarian response of immediate and unconditional acceptance of any and all claiming asylum but an invasion that must be repelled if Western civilization is to survive.

If progressives in the West are loathe to accept this conclusion, others elsewhere clearly see this invasion for what it is. How else can we explain Saudi Arabia’s offer to pay for the construction of 200 mosques for the migrants in Germany? Refugees are people forced out of their homes, looking for temporary asylum until it is safe to return. This project tells us that in the eyes of the Saudi Arabians, who have not offered to take in their fellow Muslims themselves, this is something much more permanent.

Those who are unwilling to accept this conclusion, inevitable as it is to those with the proverbial eyes to see, hurl against those who bravely speak the forbidden truth, such words as “racist” and “xenophobic” or “inhumane” and “heartless”. These are among the few words in our language that have a power comparable to that of pictures because they too speak to the emotions in a way that the words of a rational argument cannot. It is a power that is abused every time these words are spoken, for they cannot be used in good faith being accusatory words that pronounce their verdict upon the heart, known only to God, while denying the accused what in our legal and judicial tradition is a basic right, that of the presumption of innocence.

These words are weapons in the arsenal of the invaders for this is not a force armed with horses and bowmen, swords and spears, tanks, aircraft, guns and bombs. No, it has much more effective weapons than all of those. It is an invasion force like that described in Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel The Camp of the Saints, armed with our own liberalism and humanitarianism. Its chief offensive weapons, the swords against which we must quickly develop shields or perish, are our self-accusations of racism, and the picture of a drowned three year old boy.

Sinking Our Lifeboats

Imagine that you are on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. Your pilot is a historical re-enactment fanatic who, in a moment of drunken insanity, decides that the time is ripe for re-creating the sinking of the Titanic and rams the ship into an iceberg. Like everyone else on board you head to the lifeboats. You wait in line, they put you on board a lifeboat, and when it is full lower it onto the sea.

From the safety of your lifeboat you watch the ship go down and realize, to your horror, that something has gone wrong with the evacuation process. A panic has broken out and in the irrational frenzy of that panic several of the remaining lifeboats have been damaged and rendered useless. There are no longer sufficient lifeboats to carry everyone on the ship and people are jumping into the ocean and desperately swimming towards the ones already afloat, including yours.

You are now faced with a dilemma. You know that your lifeboat has a limited carrying capacity. If you let more people onto the lifeboat you risk running out of the lifeboat's resources before being rescued or, worse, capsizing the lifeboat. If that happens, you will have not only have failed to save the people you pulled from the ocean, but will have needlessly killed yourselves in the process.

American biologist and ecologist Garrett Hardin first posed this dilemma in an article for the September 1974 edition of Psychology Today entitled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” the awful subtitle of which, added by the editor without the author's approval, misses the point completely. Wealthy countries, Hardin argued, like lifeboats have limited carrying capacities and therefore taking in masses of immigrants from poorer countries will not solve the problems of poor countries but will only sink our lifeboats, metaphorically speaking.

Hardin’s article is timelier today than when it was first published forty-one years ago. For weeks now the most important international news item has been the horde of migrants evacuating Syria and flooding into Europe claiming to be refugees from the war that has ravaged that country and from the terrorism and tyranny of ISIS. The better informed among us know that this is only part of a much larger wave of migration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe that has been accelerating over the last year or so. The television and newspaper media have manipulated this story in such a way as to make us feel that Western countries are morally obliged to take in these refugees and they have been aided and abetted in this by irresponsible clergymen like the present Pope and by most of our politicians who seem to be competing with each other as to who will sink their country’s lifeboat the fastest. It is as if they were all acting out roles in a script written for them by Jean Raspail forty-two years ago.

In Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, The Camp of the Saints, an armada of one hundred ships carrying a cargo of a million of India’s poorest and most wretched, sets sail from Calcutta en route to the French Riviera. While many in France, including her president, can see the handwriting on the wall and know that if their country and civilization are to survive they must turn these invaders, armed only with their own plight, away, they lack the moral courage to do it, being paralysed by guilt induced by decades of liberalism. With the exception of a small handful of heroes in which the spirit of the old West lingers on, France succumbs to an invasion that is cheered on by her own media, politicians, and church.

When Hardin first used the lifeboat metaphor his concern was a country’s limited supply of material resources. What Raspail’s novel illustrates is that there are more important things at stake in keeping our lifeboats afloat. Our customs, way of life, beliefs, laws, traditions, history, and our very identity are all more important than physical resources. Indeed, it is these things which make possible the conditions that are attracting all of these migrants from other parts of the world.

Laws which protect and secure our persons and property, a respect for personal liberty that allows us to thrive and prosper balanced with a sense of fairness and justice that demands that we collectively look after the weaker and less successful among us, with recognized, established, and, for the most part respected, civil rights do not just come about on their own. Whether these things draw immigrants for their own sake or for the sake of the abundance of material goods that these make widely available in our countries, we tend to think of them as being based upon universal, abstract, principles available through reason to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This liberal assumption, however, does not bear the scrutiny of history in which these things developed slowly within the context of national cultures that claimed the heritage of classical Greco-Roman antiquity and of Christendom as their own. Should those cultures go down with our lifeboats, there is not the slightest shred of evidence that these things would survive, and there is plenty of evidence that they will not do so in the failed states that were once thriving colonies of European empires.

Make no mistake – the sinking of our national lifeboats, and our entire civilization along with them, is the doom that we choose for ourselves if we continue to base our response to the refugee crisis on sentiment and emotion rather than facts and reason. It is not as if the refugees were pouring into a healthy Europe of countries confident in their traditions and identities. They are pouring into a Europe which has experienced decades of low fertility in which governments have relied upon large scale immigration to keep their population levels up, a pattern encouraged by the European Union that has developed over the same period of time. While a healthy country can take in and absorb a certain number of immigrants without harm to itself for a country to rely upon large numbers of immigrants to make up for low fertility as a long-term policy is to adopt a policy of population replacement over reproduction which is to embrace its own death as a nation.

After several decades of this, what Western countries need is a break from immigration, but what our politicians are offering us instead is to inundate us yet further with thousands of migrants who claim to be refugees but are clearly behaving more like a mob of invaders. The British government has offered to resettle 20, 000 Syrian refugees by 2020, with the opposition party and its supporters complaining that this is not enough. The governments of Germany and Austria have opened their borders wide to any and all claiming asylum. Even here in Canada, an ocean and half a world removed from the Middle East, each of the two largest opposition parties are vying to outdo the other in accusing the present government of culpability in the death of the three year old boy whom the media have been dishonestly presenting as a victim of Western heartlessness and in the tens of thousands of refugees they are promising to resettle should they win the upcoming election.

There are those, of course, who will insist that to think about preserving our national identities, cultures, and ways of life while other people are fleeing persecution and war is to show a lack of perspective and wrong priorities. They might further insist that the idea that we should not think only of ourselves but of others as well is the highest ethical principle of the faith at the heart of our traditional cultures and that to abandon that principle is also, in a sense, to lose who we are. While these objections should not be lightly dismissed, we must distinguish between moral principles themselves and the sentimental way in which some would apply them.

The Golden Rule tells us to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” but as none of us in our right mind would want another country to take us in if it did so in such numbers that it lost everything that made us want to move there in the first place, this clearly does not contradict the logic of lifeboat ethics, whatever the current pretender to St. Peter's throne has to say about it. Christianity calls upon us to follow the example of Christ, and that example is one of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, but a cross is something that can only be taken up individually, not collectively. It is one thing to throw yourself in front of a bullet to save another person. It is quite another thing to put your child in the way of the bullet and then later try to claim the laurels of a hero. To insist that out of humanitarianism and compassion we resettle this growing flood of migrants in Western countries is to be like the latter person, not the former.

Worse, as is the whole point of the lifeboat metaphor, it is to be like the man who credits himself for heroism for sacrificing his child but failing to stop the bullet.