The Most Important Section in the Charter

As I have said many times in the past, I am not an admirer of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is not because I disagree with the “fundamental freedoms” listed in Section 2 or the basic legal and civil rights listed in Sections 7 to 13. All of these rights and freedoms, which are by far the most important rights and freedoms in the entire document, Canadians already possessed as subjects of Her Majesty under Common Law before 1982. The reason I dislike the Charter is because the Charter, rather than making these rights and freedoms more secure, as the Liberals who drafted it want you to believe, made them less secure. It includes two extremely broad loopholes.

The clause “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” found in Section 1 is the first of these. Who says what limits are “reasonable” and who decides whether they are “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society?” The government that seeks to place limits on these rights and freedoms cannot be trusted to make this decision itself.

The second loophole is Section 33, the Exception Section with its notorious “notwithstanding clause”. This section allows the Dominion and provincial governments to pass Acts which will operate “notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter”, i.e., the sections about our fundamental freedoms and basic legal rights. Although such Acts are required to sunset in five years (subsection 3) they can be renewed (subsection 4). This second loophole is the reason former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, and he was right to say it, that the “Charter is not worth the paper it’s written on.”

This is not the only problem with the Charter.

Section 7 reads “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice”, substituting “security of the person” for “property” which is the third of the basic rights under Common Law, in which the security of person and property is the concise way of stating all three basic rights. Property is nowhere mentioned in the Charter. This has long been criticized as one of the chief failings of this document and has been thought to reflect the Marxist inclinations of those who have led the Liberal Party, arguably since Lester Pearson became leader in 1958, but especially since Pierre Trudeau took over in 1968.

Subsection 2 of Section 4 allows a Dominion or provincial government with a large enough backing in the House of Commons or the provincial legislature – a supermajority of two-thirds – to suspend elections indefinitely in a time of “real or apprehended, war, invasion or insurrection.” Note the words “or apprehended.” The threat of war, invasion or insurrection does not have to be real. Pray that neither the Liberals nor any other party, ever obtain enough seats in Parliament to put this subsection into effect.

Subsection 2 of Section 15 nullifies what subsection 1 says about how every individual is “equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

I am not particularly keen on the wording of subsection 1 either. Saying that everyone has a right to “equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination” can be interpreted in two ways. It can be interpreted as binding the State, preventing it from practicing said discrimination in its administration of the law and justice. I would not have a problem with that interpretation. It can also be interpreted as empowering the State to interfere in our everyday interactions to make sure we aren’t discriminating against each other. I have a huge problem with that – it is a form of totalitarian thought control.

Consider the Canadian Human Rights Act which was passed five years prior to the Charter. Although the expression “human rights” is thought by most people to mean rights which all human beings possess by virtue of their humanity and which only bad governments violate, and the phrase “human rights violation” is ordinarily understood to refer to governments incarcerating people for indefinite periods without a trial, torturing them, murdering them, and the like, this Act places limits on individuals not the State, which it empowers to police the thoughts and motivations of Canadians in their private interactions with each other.

The second subsection of Section 15 states that the first subsection “does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” In other words, the State is allowed to practice discrimination on the basis of race, rational or ethnic origin, colour, religion, etc., if that discrimination is the type sometimes called reverse discrimination, that is to say, discrimination against white people, especially those of British and French stock, Christians, males, etc.

Section 15 as a whole, then, appears to authorize the State to interfere in our private affairs to prevent us from discriminating against each other, while allowing the State to practice a form of discrimination itself.

Other flaws in the Charter itself could be pointed out but those that I have mentioned here are by far the worst. Worse, in my view, than any actual flaw in the Charter, however, is the attitude towards the Charter and the set of false notions about it that the Liberal Party has encouraged us to hold ever since 1982. There are many, for example, who refer to the Charter as if it were our constitution and claim that Pierre Trudeau gave us our constitution. This is not a claim the Charter makes for itself and it is no such thing. The Charter has been a part of our constitution since 1982, but it is not the constitution itself. Indeed, even the British North America Act of 1867, which was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867 during the repatriation process which gave us the Charter but remains in effect, is not the whole of our constitution. Most of our constitution is in fact, unwritten, or, to put it another way, written in prescription and tradition rather than paper and ink. As our greatest constitution expert, the late Eugene Forsey used to say to those who made the absurd claim that Pierre Trudeau had given us our constitution, we still have the constitution we had in 1867, albeit with a new name, and bells and whistles added.

Even more common is the strange notion that the Charter itself gave us our rights and freedoms. Admirers of the Charter tend to view it this way. Some critics, such as William Gairdner (The Trouble With Canada, 1990) and Kenneth McDonald (The Monstrous Trick, 1998, Alexis in Charterland, 2004) have argued that the Charter is an example of continental-style charter law, like the Napoleonic Code, intended to replace our Common Law system of rights and freedoms. The reality is more nuanced than that. Before explaining the nuance and what really happened, we need to understand the difference between the two systems and why this would indeed be a “monstrous trick” if it were in fact true.

Under continental-style charter law, everything is imposed from the top down, from the law itself, to the rights and freedoms that exist under it. Therefore, under this kind of law, you only have the specific rights and freedoms that are spelled out on paper in black and white. The question, under this system of law, is whether or not I have permission to do something.

Under Common Law, the law is not imposed from the top down, except in the sense of the underlying natural law being laid down by God, and even then this raises the much-debated theological question of whether God’s law and justice are expressions of His character or of His will. Don’t worry. I will not attempt to answer that question here as it is quite extraneous to this discussion. The Common Law is not imposed by the State. Although the Sovereign authority, the Queen-in-Parliament, has the power to add to, subtract from, and otherwise alter the Law, the Law is not the creation of the Sovereign authority. The law arises out of natural law and justice, through a process of discovery in the courts, where disputes are brought to be arbitrated on the basis of fairly hearing all the evidence on both sides. Rights and freedoms, under Common Law, are not limited to those that are spelled out in black and white. The question, under this system of law, is whether or not I am prohibited to do something. If not, I am free to do it.

The Charter of Freedoms does not actually replace Common Law with continental-style charter law. It merely creates the impression of having done so. The Charter does not identify itself as the source of our rights and freedoms, nor does it say that we have only those rights and freedoms it spells out. Indeed, it states the very opposite of this. Remember that the addition of the Charter was part of a constitutional repatriation process that required adopting an amendment formula and which required the participation of the provincial governments. Nine out of ten of the provinces are fully Common Law, and it is the exception, which under the provisions of the Quebec Act of 1774 has a hybrid of Common Law criminal law and French civil law, which dissented from the final product. The Liberals would never have been able to get away with substituting continental law for Common Law in this context in 1982. They, quite in keeping with their modus operandi of never telling the truth when a lie will suffice, settled for creating the impression that they had done so. Their totalitarian ends would be met, as long as Canadians started to think in terms of “am I permitted” rather than “is it prohibited.”

This is why the most important section in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is Section 26. Here it is in full:

The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed as denying the existence of any other rights or freedoms that exist in Canada.

This is the Charter’s acknowledgement, tucked away in the miscellaneous category towards the end rather than being placed in the very first section as it ought to have been, that the Charter did not take us out from under Common Law and cause all of our Common Law rights and freedoms to disappear.

To illustrate what this means in application to a current hot topic, the Supreme Court of Canada was entirely in the wrong when it said as part of its ruling in R v Hasselwander in 1993, that Canadians have no constitutional right to own guns. The passing of the Charter, by its own admission in Section 26, did not cancel our right, as subjects of Her Majesty, to have arms for our defence, such as are allowed by law. This is a Common Law right, the fifth right that Sir William Blackstone in the first volume of his Commentary on the Laws of England (1765) identified as a necessary auxiliary to the basic and absolute rights of life, liberty, and property, and which had been put into statute in the Bill of Rights of 1689. This does not mean that the Supreme Court of Canada was necessarily wrong in its ruling on this case which involved the confiscation of a Mini-Uzi sub-machine gun. It does mean, however, that it erred in saying that Canadians had no constitutional gun rights. This was in response to the defence’s own mistake of trying to argue based upon American law, but what they should have said was that Canadians’ Common Law right to own guns is not absolute, but is subject to the qualification “as are allowed by law.”

The significance of Section Twenty-Six is much larger than this however. It means that we should stop listening to all the lies of the Liberals and their supporters in the schools and media, and insist upon all of our traditional rights and freedoms as Her Majesty’s free subjects.

If We Must Take Away Guns From People Start With the Police

This Monday the police in Lethbridge, Alberta, made total jackasses out of themselves. I would make a remark about how prone Canadian police are to doing this but it seems to be universal and not just limited to the Dominion.

Monday, due to the pun that can be made out of the date – “May the 4th be with you” – rather than it having any significance in the history of the popular motion picture franchise, was Star Wars Day. There is a Star Wars theme restaurant in Lethbridge called the Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina. On “Star Wars Day” they asked one of their employees, a nineteen year old girl, to wear Storm Trooper armour and stand outside the restaurant greeting people. To complete the costume they gave her a plastic gun.

A couple of brain-dead idiots called 9-11 and reported her. Presumably they had to ask somebody to look up the number for them. The police showed up to investigate and, being even more stupid than their informants, pulled their guns on her, yelled at her, forced her to the ground, and handcuffed her. They released her without charging her, possibly after checking to see whether or not plastic toys are on Captain Airhead’s new list of prohibited guns.

I would suspect that they had been raiding the evidence locker had Captain Airhead not legalized marijuana a couple of years ago.

According to the Lethbridge Police Service they are conducting an internal investigation into “whether the officers acted appropriately within the scope of their training and LPS policies and procedures.” Since such an investigation requires what Dame Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poiroit called the “little grey cells”, and I doubt that Chief Scott Woods could find two such to rub together in his entire staff, I’ll spare him the time and trouble. No they did not.

All of this raises the question of why, since Captain Airhead and other progressives are so bent on harassing hunters, farmers, and other law-abiding gun owners in order to pretend to be doing something about gun violence, they allow the police to continue to carry the handguns that were forbidden to Her Majesty’s average, ordinary, law-abiding subjects long ago.

Since we inherited our Common Law, judicial system, and Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy from the United Kingdom it is fair to ask why we follow the American example rather than the British when it comes to arming the police. In the United Kingdom, bobbies traditionally do not carry guns, and with the exception of Northern Ireland, for reasons which probably do not need to be stated, and specially trained armed officers who are not the regular constabulary, this remains true to this day. Note that this dates back long before the very recent period in which most guns were taken way from the general populace in the UK and Canada. It was never, therefore, a matter of the police having been able to enforce the law without guns because there were no guns in the communities they patrolled.

The main reason for this has to do with the way in which the role and duty of a policeman have been traditionally understood in the British system of law and government, which, I would again remind you, is the system we have inherited here in Canada. The policeman is not there to impose the will of the state on people by force. That is the function of the police in a police state. The policeman’s role and duty is to uphold the Law and maintain the Queen’s peace. The law the policeman upholds is the Common Law, which although it can be modified by the Sovereign legislative power of the Queen-in-Parliament, is not the will of the state being imposed from the top down, but is rather the natural law as discovered and casuistically interpreted through the accumulation of case precedents in the courts. The police maintain the Queen’s peace by being the local presence of her authority to uphold this Law within the community and the reminder of our duty to bring disputes which we cannot settle on our own before this Law for arbitration rather than breaking the peace with violence. Carrying a gun while on regular patrol duty was traditionally seen as being incompatible with this role.

Another underlying reason can be found in the fact that the qualities that we look for in recruiting police officers largely overlap those that incline people towards violent criminal activity. Much like the military, the police force serves the important sociological function of diverting the aggression of the young and strong into the service and defence of society and away from outlets such as crime which attack and harm it. (1) This is the most positive way of making this point. A more negative way would be to say that the police are the segment of the criminal element of society that has been enlisted by the state to keep the rest of their own kind in check as a sort of legitimate protection racket.

You can find an illustration of this negative spin in Anthony Burgess’ dystopic 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. In this novel, an allegory of the orthodox Christian doctrine that freedom of choice is essential to true goodness, the main character Alex, is the leader of a gang of teenage thugs who go on an extremely violent crime spree. After perpetrating a home invasion in which he beats to death the wealthy woman who owns the house, his “droogs” turn on him and he is arrested. He obtains early release from prison after volunteering for the experimental Ludovico Technique, which removes his ability to commit violence, even in self-defense, by programming him to experience agonizing pain every time a violent thought enters his mind. He finds that he is no longer the predator but the prey, and among the first to prey upon him are his old gang mates, who are now policemen.

Whichever spin we prefer to put on this, the positive or the negative, the fact remains that we recruit the police largely on the basis of traits which, otherwise directed, contribute to a propensity for criminal behaviour. These are traits that are at their peak in adolescence to young adulthood and tend to soften with age, experience, and wisdom. This is why an unfortunate side effect of the necessity of a police force, is the phenomenon of police throwing their weight around, bullying, brutalizing, and harassing people. This is another good reason for not sending them out on patrol with firearms. While the police involved in such behaviour are generally younger, immature, inexperienced, rookies, by the time they have gained enough maturity, experience, and wisdom that they can be trusted to carry guns without doing something stupid, like pulling them on a teenager, engaged in Star Wars cosplay as part of her job, they should have learned how to uphold the law’s authority without them.

There are reasons why our police, like those of the republic to our south, carry guns, rather than following the established tradition of the country from which we inherited our constitution, law, and civilized, ordered, liberty. Chief among these is the fact that when our country was first established, the agency that was tasked with enforcing the law in the large chunk of territory that was still being settled and organized into provinces, had a military as well as a police function. Indeed, this agency which eventually became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was responsible for military intelligence in the Dominion up until the formation of CSIS in 1984. That the agency originally had a military as well as a police function can still be seen in the Red Serge, the traditional ceremonial dress uniform of the Mounties. This uniform clearly has its origins in the traditional uniform of the British army, from which the informal nickname “red coats” was derived, rather than that of the bobby.

The RCMP has no military functions now, however, and neither do any of our provincial or city and municipal police forces. Nevertheless, they still carry firearms. The firearms they carry are handguns, which have been illegal for the civilian populace to carry for years. The handguns the police carry are typically semi-automatics. The semi-automatic re-loading feature is the only feature of the battery of guns that Captain Airhead has just banned that has anything to do with anything other than the outward look of the weapons. Note that outside of the Liberal Party itself, and the further-left parties, Liberal gun grabs receive more support from the police, or at least the higher officials who speak on behalf of the police, than from anyone else in Canada. You might recall that seven years ago, the Mounties took advantage of the flood situation in High River, Alberta, to raid people’s homes and confiscate whatever guns they found there.

The police – or the leadership of the police – do not like farmers and hunters and collectors owning guns, even as they carry semi-automatic pistols with them at all times. Perhaps the time has come to demand that it be done unto them as they would have done unto us. Tyrants, from Critias in ancient Athens to Hitler and Stalin in the twentieth century, have always insisted upon an armed security force and an unarmed populace. An armed populace and an unarmed police would be far more consistent with the principles of civilization and ordered liberty enshrined in our constitution and Common Law.


(1) I remember there being an interesting discussion of this in one of those books that were popular in the 1960s, written by ethologists and anthropologists who took what they had observed of social behaviour among animals and applied it to human social behaviour from a Darwinian perspective. These were precursors to the books on sociobiology which Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins put out in the 1970s and those on evolutionary psychology by John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Stephen Pinker, et al., which began appearing in the 1990s. It was either Konrad Lorenz’ On Aggression (1963, English translation 1966) or one of Lionel Tiger’s books, Men in Groups (1969) or The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox, 1971), but I don’t recall exactly which one and would have to dig through my library to locate my copies before I could hunt through them for the passage I have in mind. While I don’t accept the Darwinian presuppositions and framework of these authors, I recall that I largely agreed with whichever author it was on this particular point. I also remember reading feminist attacks on these authors – one of these was in Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981) – because they had explained differences in behaviour between the sexes as arising out innate differences. At the time, the feminist argument for feminizing the police and armed forces was that no such innate differences existed and that therefore to avoid discrimination and to be fair men and women needed to be equally represented. Later feminists who embraced innate differences, would argue for the same policy but on the grounds that the police and armed forces needed to be feminized to dilute male aggression and create a police and army that were more caring, sensitive, etc. We have now had women in the police and the military for quite some time, and the effect has certainly not been that which the latter group of feminists predicted. While this might have come as a surprise to the feminists and even to people like Lorenz, Tiger, and Fox who took it for granted that aggression was predominately male, it would not have shocked Rudyard Kipling, who versified his own observations about the greater aggression of the female in 1911.

Canadians’ Common Law Right to Bear Arms

The Liberal Party, its supporters, and other progressives, leftists and kooks who support making Canada's already more than sufficient gun laws stricter, are quick to accuse those of us who disagree with them of wanting to bring American gun culture into Canada. This is rather rich, at least on the part of the Liberals, who historically have been the party of Americanization. As is so often the case with the Grits, they are relying upon the widespread ignorance that they themselves have done so much to promote among Canadians of our history, traditions, and the basic principles of our laws and governing institutions to help them sell their arguments. They are also relying upon assumptions about the American system that many Canadians hold but which are less than accurate. (1)


The Canadian and American paths diverged in the eighteenth century. In 1776 the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from the British Empire. The French-speaking, Roman Catholic colony of Canada, which had been ceded to the British Crown by France at the end of the Seven Years War, remained loyal to the Crown that had guaranteed its language and religion, as did the colonies that became the Maritime Provinces. After the Americans won their secession in war, the members of their colonies who had remained loyal to the Crown fled persecution from the triumphant Yankees and came north to the Maritimes and this colony that bore the name Canada prior to its being applied to the Dominion formed from the Confederation of British North America in 1867. In their Declaration of Independence, the rebelling Yanks maintained that the government in London had violated their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and in subsequent war-time propaganda, they attacked the institution of the monarchy as being the source of their grievances. This was all pure propaganda. The policies they objected to in London had their origins in the elected House of Commons and hardly added up to an assault on the basic rights of the Americans.


I do not bring this up, however, to belabour the case against Revolution-era American propaganda but to make the point that the Canadian and American paths diverged by the Americans consciously choosing to break from the larger political society to which they had previously belonged, while those who would become the Canadians, equally consciously, chose to remain. The American tradition, as it developed from this point forward, diverged further from the British tradition, whereas the Canadian tradition remained close to that tradition and developed in conjunction with it. This is most evident in the governing institutions of both federations. The Americans, whose developing national self-image fused the Puritan concept of "city on a shining hill" with that of a "new Rome", built for themselves a federal republic. We, whose growing national self-image was rooted in the Loyalist heritage of honour and continuity, established a parliamentary monarchy patterned closely after the Westminster model with the same royal Head of State.


It logically follows from the above that if something in the American tradition as it developed away from the British tradition can trace its source to the British tradition then it was part of the latter tradition prior to the break and is therefore part of the Canadian heritage as well. This happens to be the case with the idea of a right to bear arms.


It has been widely thought that when Thomas Jefferson included the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the American Declaration of Independence he was borrowing, or, rather, adapting a concept from John Locke. Locke, who writings providing secular arguments for the positions of the Puritan-founded Whig Party, largely created the philosophical framework of classical liberalism, wrote of the triad of basic rights as life, liberty and property. Much closer to the time of the American Revolution, the same triad of basic rights featured into the famous four volume Commentary on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone. Blackstone was the first to hold the position of Professor of Common Law at Oxford University established in the late 1750s by an endowment in the will of the jurist Charles Viner. His Commentary was published from 1765 to 1770, the last volume appearing six years prior to the American Revolution. Unlike Locke, Blackstone was a Tory, and this demonstrates that the idea of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property was firmly established in the British Common Law tradition and treated as such by both parties.


Blackstone in his Commentary further identified five auxiliary rights as being necessary in order to protect the basic three. Of the final of these auxiliary rights he says:


The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. (this and the following quotation are from Volume I of the Commentary on the Laws of England)


While the language is not the absolute language of the American Second Amendment since it includes qualifications and allows for legal limitations, having arms for defence is clearly identified as an essential right of the subjects of the Crown. Here is how he described all the auxiliary rights taken together:


But in vain would these rights [the basic and absolute rights of life, liberty, and property] be declared, ascertained, and protected by the dead letter of the laws, if the constitution had provided no other method to secure their actual enjoyment. It has therefore established certain other auxiliary subordinate rights of the subject, which serve principally as outworks or barriers to protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights, of personal security, personal liberty, and private property.


Blackstone was speaking about the basic and auxiliary rights of subjects of the Crown. If these were the rights of the subjects of the Crown, prior to the American rebellion, they still belonged to those who remained loyal subjects of the Crown after the Americans had broken away.


Blackstone did not just pull these rights out of thin air. In the case of the right to bear arms in their own defence this was spelled out in statute in the Bill of Rights that the Whig-dominated Parliament had passed in 1689 when it changed the reigning dynasty to ensure a Protestant succession. The wording is virtually identical to Blackstone's except that the Bill limits the right to Protestants. Here is the wording:


That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.


This was not a right that was newly minted in 1689. If anything, it was a softening of the way in which this had been viewed in previous centuries, id est, that having arms for defence was an obligation of the Crown’s subjects and not merely a right. At this point in British history a permanent force of professional soldiers was a relatively novel concept. In most previous centuries, when wars arose all able-bodied males were expected to do their duty, take up their arms, and fight for their king and country. Such a duty required that they have arms to take up. This is the militia model of national defence. It was quite common in feudal monarchies, has been used for centuries by the federal republic of the Swiss Confederation, was envisioned by the Founding Fathers of the United States for their own federal republic where it was supplanted by the permanent army model, and played a very important role in the history of our own country and the development of our own national identity of tradition.


In Canada, the militia model and permanent army models, were not historically regarded in the adversarial terms of either/or but rather the complementary terms of both/and. The reasons for this are rooted in our history. By the time the Americans broke away from the British Empire while those who became the Canadians remained loyal, the British Empire had a standing army. Since we were on this side of the Atlantic, however, sharing a continent with the newly formed breakaway republic, the militia model of defence was necessary to supplement the Imperial Army in securing us against threats from the United States, whether in the form of terrorist raids by the Fenian Brotherhood or an official invasion.


Although threats of invasion emanated from Washington DC quite frequently as the Americans unfolded their doctrine of Manifest Destiny in the decades leading up to Confederation there was only one occasion in which this invasion actually materialized and this event was perhaps the single most important event in shaping our national identity that occurred in pre-Confederation Canada. That was the war that was fought between the British Empire and the United States of America from 1812 to 1815 and is generally called after the year in which it started. At the time this war broke out, the British Empire had already been at war with Napoleonic France for nine years. The actions on the part of the British navy to which the Americans objected and made their casus belli for war in 1812 had been undertaken as part of the war effort against Napoleon and the fact that the Imperial fleet and army were occupied with fighting the Little Corporal elsewhere in the world led the Americans to believe that British North America would be an easy conquest for them. They, of course, justified their invasion to themselves as being one of “liberation.”


They learned the hard way that they were wrong on both counts. British North America was not an easy conquest, and their invasion was not welcomed as an act of “liberation.” The British government had had the foresight at the start of the Napoleonic Wars to begin enlisting Canadians into the army and organizing them into units for the purpose of the protection of British North America. As W. L. Morton put it:


The six British battalions in the country would supply the discipline. To these were added the Canadian regulars, of whom the Glengarry Light Infantry, a militia battalion of veteran Highlanders and the Voltigeurs of Lower Canada under a Canadian officer of the British Army, Colonel Charles de Salaberry, were the chief in 1812. (The Kingdom of Canada, 2nd ed., p. 204)


In addition to these, however, Major-General Isaac Brock was able to call upon the armed populace of both Upper and Lower Canada to fight as militia alongside the regular army. Some of the militia groups would be disbanded after the war, others would be incorporated into the regular armed forces. Whether as part of the regular army or the militias, English and French speaking Canadians fought alongside the British Imperial army and allied Indian tribes, and repelled the American invaders in a series of notable battles beginning with Queenston Heights in 1812, where Major-General Brock was killed, and culminating with Lundy’s Lane in Niagara Falls in 1814.


These deeds, celebrated in the second stanza of Alexander Muir’s “The Maple Leaf Forever”, written in the year of Confederation and which served as an unofficial national anthem back in the period when our national self-image was still healthy, were, until very recently, in the minds of most Canadians awarded an honour that was equal, if not greater, to that given to the brave acts of our soldiers who fought in the two World Wars. In the minds of many Canadians they are still awarded that honour. These events left an impression on the Canadian psyche that even the Liberal Party, try though it may, has heretofore been unable to erase.


Liberals and other progressives hate this history, because it reveals that the true, historical Canada is very different from the much more recent image that they have sought to impose on our country. The Loyalists of pre-Confederation British North America, the Fathers of Confederation, and the leadership of our country up to and including both World Wars, held a notion of our civic duty that was virtually the opposite of that which the Liberals prescribe to us today. The idea that it is the duty of all of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects, to participate in the defence of our community and nation, whether against crimes directed against our persons, families, and property or foreign invasion like we kind we helped repel from 1812 to 1814, is abhorrent to them. Their idea of civic duty is to passively allow ourselves to be victimized, and leave defence up to the “professionals.” Indeed, today they seem completely incapable of distinguishing between vigilantism, which is the unlawful dispensing of personal “justice”, and civic duty. Think back two and a half months to when Peter MacKay, one of the candidates in the Conservative Party’s now-suspended leadership race, was denounced by mindless, left-wing, nincompoops for a tweet that they said “promoted vigilantism.” The supposed “vigilantism’ consisted of removing the garbage that people who were likely paid by American billionaires to be eco-protestors pretending to speak for an Indian tribe in British Columbia, had placed upon a railroad in Alberta.


Our right to bear arms as Canadians is nowhere mentioned in the Charter of 1982, but is part of our Common Law heritage. For almost forty years the Liberal Party has tried to make us forget that the Common Law and not the Charter is the source of our rights and freedoms, just as they want us to forget our entire Loyalist history, tradition, and heritage, the older sense of civic duty evidenced by the actions of the Canadian militia in the War of 1812, and that Queen-in-Parliament is the sovereign authority in our country and not Prime Minister-in-Cabinet. Our Common Law right to bear arms has never been an absolute right, although until well into the twentieth century, both here and in the United Kingdom, guns were as easily obtainable as anywhere in the United States. The Liberals’ greatest fear is that we will remember all of these things.


That our government and that of the United Kingdom seem to have forgotten the right to bear arms except for the “such as are allowed by law” part is most regrettable. Gun legislation that is responsible and reasonable, such as that which requires that those purchasing guns show that they have been trained in the responsible use of firearms, is one thing. The kind of gun control the Liberal Party has been pushing on us since the Chretien years, in which gun related atrocities in big cities are used as an excuse for cracking down on law-abiding, mostly rural, gun owners is another thing altogether. The former is compatible with the right contained in the Common Law, spelled out in the Bill of Rights of 1689, and elaborated upon by Blackwell. The latter is not.


(1) The assumption that the Second Amendment of the American Constitution makes gun rights absolute in the United States is what I have in mind here. Canadians, whether they think it a good or a bad thing, tend to borrow this assumption from Americans who interpret their Second Amendment this way. While telling the Americans what to think about the interpretation of their own Constitution is hardly any business of mine, I will make the following observation. The Amendment is worded in absolute language “the right…shall not be infringed” but is part of a Bill of Rights that was the Jeffersonian or Anti-federalist contribution to the American Constitution. That Bill, from the First to the Tenth Amendment, is as much about keeping the government of the federal republic that was established in 1789 from interfering in the affairs of its member states, as it is about protecting individual rights, perhaps even more so. In other words, as its framers understood it, it prohibited only the American federal government from making laws that infringe upon gun ownership, not the state governments. Of course, all of the intentions of those who drafted the Bill of Rights were thwarted by the triumphant side in the American internecine war of 1861-1865.


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Captain Airhead's Communazi Gun Grab

During last year's Dominion election, when Captain Airhead was being swamped with scandal after scandal about how, despite all of his lectures to the rest of us about tolerance, multiculturalism, and diversity and despite his accusing everyone who disagreed with him, but especially Conservatives, of being a racist, he had frequently made use of "blackface" makeup, he sought to deflect attention from his crumbling image by promising a ban on military-style assault weapons.

This was a ridiculous promise to make for many reasons. The most obvious reason is that military assault weapons are already illegal for civilians to own in Canada. They have been illegal for over forty years. Captain Airhead ought to know this because it was his father who banned them. Perhaps he can be excused for not knowing that because he was only six years old at the time. I know it, however, and I was only one.

After the Nova Scotia mass shooting the other weekend Captain Airhead renewed this pledge. On Friday morning, in his daily performance for the news camera, he announced a ban on 1500 kinds of assault weapons.

Since assault weapons were already illegal for civilians to own what was he talking about?

The weapons he banned are semi-automatic rifles similar to and including the AR-15. Semi-automatic means that the chamber reloads itself, but it requires a separate trigger pull for each bullet. Although there is a military grade AR-15, that is not the AR-15 that has just been banned. The AR-15 style rifle that civilians have, up to now, been able, provided they go through the process of getting a gun licence, been able to purchase is a version of the military rifle that has been downgraded to an ordinary, semi-automatic, hunting and sporting rifle, by removing the functional features of a military grade weapon while retaining its outward appearance. None of the rifles banned are military grade weapons. They are ordinary, semi-automatic hunting rifles, that have a military "look" to them but lack the functional features that would distinguish a true, military, semi-automatic from a hunting semi-automatic. The AR in AR-15 does not stand for "Assault Rifle." The A stands for ArmaLite, the company that originally designed the rifle before selling it to Colt.

Captain Airhead said of these weapons "These weapons were designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time." That is pure stercus tauri. Captain Airhead lies and he knows that he lies! As with any other hunting and sporting rifle that lacks their outward military look, these are sold to decent, law-abiding, salt-of-the-earth type Canadians who use them to hunt, to kill predators that threaten their livestock and other nuisance animals like gophers, and for target shooting.

The only word in the phrase "military-style assault weapon" as Captain Airhead has been using it that has any meaning is the word "style." It is all about the outward appearance of the guns. Indeed, this is about outward appearance in more ways than one.

Had this new gun ban been put in place one month earlier, it would not have prevented the shootings in Nova Scotia on April 18th and 19th. The perpetrator, Gabriel Wortman, whose name I would not have bothered to look up except that Captain Airhead does not want people using it and Captain Airhead can futuit ipsum, did not possess a licence to acquire and possess guns legally. It is unlikely that he could have obtained such a permit had he applied. He had been banned from possessing weapons after an assault charge eighteen years ago. The point is, that like most people who commit gun crimes, in Canada, he did not obtain his guns legally. Therefore, banning a particular gun would not have prevented this crime from taking place. For which reason it makes no rational sense as a response to this crime..

It was not intended to be. It was all about image. Captain Airhead wanted to be perceived as the Prime Minister who did something about gun crime, rather than the moron who went around calling everybody racist before getting caught wearing blackface, and so he promised to ban these guns. Then, when the Nova Scotia shootings occurred, he jumped on the opportunity to take advantage of other people's pain and suffering to make himself look good. He then took advantage of Parliament's not being in full session to quickly pass legislation that, due to his government being a minority government, he would never have been able to pass this fast had Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition been able to do its job properly. The legislation would not have prevented Wortman's crime had it been passed previously, it will do nothing to prevent future crimes of the type from occurring, it will only further harass all the law-abiding, gun-owning, Canadians that the Liberal Party loves to harass with stupid laws like this because they usually are not Liberal voters. It is just another example of Captain Airhead trying to look good for his support base of leftist, progressive, dolts.

If Captain Airhead really wanted to do something about preventing future mass shootings he would call for an immediate lift of all the restrictions that have been put in place by public health authorities who have blindly followed the recommendations of a World Health Organization that has been acting, under the leadership of an ethno-Marxist Director-General, as if it were the propaganda wing of the largest remaining Communist regime. These idiotic restrictions have robbed thousands of people of their livelihoods, the Nova Scotia killer among them. Government-mandated universal social isolation can cause people to snap. The longer these restrictions are in place, the more likely it will be that other people will lose their minds in a violent, destructive way. Ending the lockdown would be a far more sensible response to this event than a useless gun ban. It would have meant less totalitarianism, however, when Captain Airhead, who announced this ban on a Communist holiday, clearly wants more.

Plagued By Dictators

For almost two months now our public health authorities, Dominion and provincial, have been acting like dictators. They have suspended our basic rights and freedoms, denied us access to public facilities such as libraries, gyms and parks, forced businesses that they consider to be “non-essential” even though they are hardly such to the livelihood of the owners and employees to close, locked up the Churches, synagogues and other places of worship, and otherwise acted as if they were the second coming of Joseph Stalin. Our provincial premiers have been no better. Even those I previously had a degree of respect for, such as Upper Canada’s Doug Ford, whose late brother Rob must be spinning in his grave right about now, have shown their true tyrannical colours. The worst of all has been Captain Airhead, the Prime Minister in the Dominion government. While Liberal Prime Ministers since Mackenzie King have behaved like autocratic control freaks rather than the humble servants of Queen-in-Parliament that they are supposed to be, the Trudeaus, who never met a Communist dictatorship they did not admire and fawn over and strive to imitate, have been by far the worst.

Many of those who, like this writer, were fed up with all of this the first hour into the lockdown, might be surprised to learn that creating a dictatorship in response to a plague is not a new phenomenon. Universal quarantines are new – previously, we quarantined only the sick or those we had good reason to suspect might have contracted the contagion. Plague time dictators, however, go back to the very first dictators, those of ancient Rome.

The eternal city was originally a monarchy. Its legendary founder, Romulus, was its first king. Romulus’s fourth successor and Rome’s fifth king, Lucius Tarquinus Priscus, was an Etruscan. Beginning with his reign, the Etruscans gained more and more influence over Rome and this created a growing division between the monarchy and the Senate, the Council of the patriarchs of the noble Roman families which Romulus had established to help him govern the city. In the reign of the seventh and last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who seized the throne through the assassination of his predecessor, his arrogance – which is actually what his cognomen signifies – and his crimes, along with those of his son, Sextus, pushed that division to the breaking point. When Sextus, through threats and blackmail forced himself upon Lucretia, the wife of the nobleman Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, leading to her taking her own life in shame, her husband and father, along with Lucius Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius, drove the Tarquins out of Rome after which the Senate declared the city to be a republic.

This was the first occasion in which the word republic was used to signify a government without a king. Res publica, which literally means “the public thing”, was one of two Latin expressions commonly used to translate the Greek politeia, which simply refers to the institutions which are constitutionally set up to look after the business of the public regardless of whether they be monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or a mixture, and is best rendered in English by “state”, “commonwealth” or even “constitution.” When the Roman Senate borrowed this Latin expression to refer to their new type of constitution, small-r republicanism was born.

As much as Tarquin the Proud deserved being deposed, the problem stemmed from who he was as a person and not from his office of authority. The Roman nobles of the sixth century BC were not thinking of this, however, when they drove him out, and so they created an inferior constitution, a republic. There are many roles and duties in the constitution of a state that can only properly be filled and performed by a king or queen. I do not intend to argue this point at length here, having made it many times in the past, and mention it only by way of introducing the observation that the Romans themselves quickly figured out that they had created a constitutional vacuum that would need, on certain occasions, to be filled. Thus they created the office of dictator.


Today the terms dictator and tyrant are more or less interchangeable but his was not the case back then. The term tyrant was used to refer to a ruler who was the opposite of a king. Whereas a true king came to his office lawfully, a tyrant was generally a usurper. The term tyrant comes from a word that originally referred to usurpation and it came to be associated with the heavy-handed abuse of power because someone who unlawfully seizes power does so because he thirsts for power and is therefore inclined to abuse it in a way that is not generally true of a lawful king. Note that Tarquin the Proud, who became "king" by assassinating Servius Tullius, was properly a tyrant rather than a king. When the Romans created the office of dictator, the term did not carry any of the opprobrium that would later be attached to it and was already at that time attached to the term tyrant.


The Roman office of dictator was a temporary position. The term was six months, half of that of the consuls, the two co-presidents of the Roman Republic, the first of whom were the aforementioned Brutus and Collatinus. When an emergency arose in which the Romans perceived the need for a single individual to wield the undivided supreme Imperium, the Senate would ask one or the other of the consuls, or both in the event that neither was off on a military venture somewhere, to name a dictator. Sworn into office, his first duty would be to name a magister equitum - master of horse. This was his lieutenant, his second-in-command, his "vice-dictator." The title obviously derives from the expectation that he would lead the cavalry that would accompany the unified army led by the dictator. This points to the fact that the emergencies that prompted the appointment of a dictator tended to be military in nature, when some powerful enemy threatened the city.


The first time this happened, at least according to Livy, was in the ninth year of the Roman Republic. War with the Sabines seemed imminent and the Senate asked consul Postumus Cominius Auruncus to name a dictator. He named his co-consul Titus Lartius Flavus, who appointed Spurius Cassius Viscellinus, one of the consuls of the previous year, to be his master of horse. Although war was declared, no fighting ensued, and Lartius laid down his powers before his six months expired.


The final Roman dictator was Gaius Julius Caesar, who was made dictator for life. That life was cut short on the Ides of March in 44 BC, when he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a gang of conspirators, one of the leaders of which was his former friend, Marcus Junius Brutus, a descendant of the Brutus who had been the first consul of Rome. His death brought the office of dictator to an end because that office existed to fill the vacuum in the Roman constitution that had been created by the absence of a king. A new Roman monarchy would soon be established when Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son and heir, Gaius Octavius was declared by the Senate to be the sole ruler of Rome and given the titles of Augustus (1) which means “exalted one”, Princeps, which means “first, chief, prince”, and Imperator, which had been a military term meaning “general” but from that point on would also mean “emperor”, a connotation the family name “Caesar” would also soon take on.


In between Lartius and Ceasar, the most well-known dictator, and the one who is the most admired, was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who held the position twice. In 458 BC, war with the Aequi left one of the consular armies besieged and the other powerless to help. Cincinnatus, an elderly farmer, was at his field, the legend says, when a delegation from the Senate arrived to tell him that he had been named dictator. With Lucius Tarquitius as his master of horse, he conscripted a large army, marched to the relief of the besieged consul, quickly forced the Aequi into submission at the Battle of Mount Algidus, and returned to his plow in a fortnight plus one day. His second dictatorship was almost as short, and involved putting down an internal conspiracy against the city.


Usually the emergencies were military in nature, but this was not always the case.


It can be amusing, when reading the ancient Roman historian Livy's multi-volume history of Rome from its beginning down to his own era, the Augustinian, to note the many occasions on which the Romans appointed a dictator in order to pound a nail into a wall. This, of course, sounds to the modern reader like a ridiculous thing to do and it is made all the more absurd by the way in which every time this happened the dictator would name a master of horse even though the task for which he was appointed sounds very much like a one-man job and was not military in nature.


Perhaps you are wondering what sort of bizarre carpentry emergency was constantly arising that required a dictator to take up the hammer. This is the funniest part of it all because it had nothing to do with carpentry at all but was done whenever the city was threatened by a plague.


Now if your next question pertains to what they were smoking in ancient Rome and/or where you might acquire some of it, allow me to assure you that while promising to legalize the abuse of mind-altering substances helped Captain Airhead to seize power, it had nothing to do with the Roman custom of nominating a dictator to drive a nail into the wall to stop a plague.


What I have been talking about was a religious ceremony. The nail, a symbol of the goddesses of fate, destiny, and necessity, would be ceremonially driven into a wall once a year, upon an important anniversary, in a number of Roman temples. The most important of these ceremonies was the one that took place in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. Tarquin the Elder had begun construction of this Temple in his reign, but it was not completed until the period in which Tarquin the Proud was driven out and the Republic established. It was consecrated on September 13th in either 509 BC or 507 BC. The reason for the uncertainty is that while the ancient authorities are in agreement that Marcus Horatius Pulvius, the uncle of the famous Horatius Cocles who figures in to story about “Horatius at the Bridge”, was the consul who consecrated the Temple, they do not agree as to whether it was while he was suffect consul in 509 or during his second consulship in 507. At any rate, each year on that date the Epulum Jovis banquet would be held in honour of the temple’s patron deity. On the same day the clavis annalis would take place, in which one of the consuls would ritually attach a nail to the wall of the Temple, on the right side near the shrine to Minerva. Horatius was probably the first to perform this ritual.


The law governing this ritual was itself written out and attached to the wall where the ritual was performed. It specified that only the praeter maximus, or chief magistrate, could perform it. For the annual ritual, this meant one of the consuls. Whenever the Senate decided that there was an emergency calling for a special extra performance of the ritual, only a dictator would suffice. The first time this happened, according to Livy, was in 363 BC. A plague had been ravaging the city for a couple of years. Lucius Manlius Capitolinus Imperiosus was named dictator (Lucius Pinarius Natta was his master of horse if you wish to know) for the purpose of performing this ritual. After he had hammered the nail into the wall the plague stopped. On several subsequent occasions when Rome was threatened by a plague this was repeated.


Exactly why the Romans thought this would work is unclear because the original significance of the ritual has been lost to the sands of time. The seeming success of the first performance might explain its having been repeated but not why it was done in the first place. One explanation is that the nail was thought to be symbolically driven through the spirit behind the plague, fixing him in place and preventing him from doing harm, but nobody really knows for sure.


Today’s epidemiologists would scoff at such an unscientific and superstitious manner of dealing with a plague but I see little evidence that would commend their own approach as being superior. Science and superstition are a lot more closely related than they would like us to believe. The methodology of each involves about an equal amount of guesswork, blind leaps in the dark, hit and miss, trial and error, and sheer dumb luck. Science is more respectable only because it has shinier, fancier, equipment and more impressive technical terminology. Where Roman superstition is truly vulnerable to critique is on the religious grounds. A far better religious response to a plague is to do as the king of Nineveh did in the book of Jonah, and call upon the nation to turn to the true and living God in humility, confessing our sins, and repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Our superstitious medical dictators obviously want none of that, however, as evidenced by their locking up all the Churches during Lent, the annual season of pre-Paschal repentance.


Indeed, the ancient Roman technique has this to commend it in comparison with today’s medical dictatorship. It at least complies with what has been recognized as the first rule of medical ethics since Hippocrates of Kos, who died seven years before the first time a Roman dictator was called upon to stop a plague with a nail. Whether it did any good or not, it could not conceivably do any harm. Shutting down society and the economy and putting everybody under universal house arrests does immeasurable harm – economic, moral, legal, political, social, spiritual, psychological, physical, and even mortal.


The lesson in all of this for Captain Airhead is that if he truly feels this pandemic requires a dictatorial response, he would be better off looking to the example of the ancient Roman dictators rather than modern Communist ones. If he really wants to be useful, he could, if he can figure out the difference between the flat and the pointy end, try hammering a nail into a wall.



(1) Although this was a title that was passed on to all of his heirs, it is also used as the personal name by which historians identify him after his elevation to the rank of emperor.

Crown, Parliament, and Common Law

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Derek Sloan Asked the Right Question!

Derek Sloan, the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Hastings - Lennox and Addington in Upper Canada, has gotten the panties of the press prostitutes all twisted into a knot. Arming themselves with the print and cyber, verbal equivalents of torches and pitchforks, they have formed a lynch mob and demanded that Andrew Scheer, the Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, which is Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in the present Parliament, hand him over to them.

His offence was to tweet out a video asking a very valid question about Dr. Theresa Tam, the Dominion's Chief Public Health Officer. The question was one of whom does she serve, Her Majesty's free Dominion of Canada or the Communist regime of Red China. Those who are howling for his head say that this is racist.

Yet, they themselves are the ones focusing on Dr. Tam's race, ethnicity and skin colour.

That Mr. Sloan's question is not a racist one can be easily demonstrated by the fact that the very same question can be legitimately asked of the Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, or, as some like to call him, Justin Trudeau. About seven years ago, he was caught on tape blithering on like the idiot he is, about how he much he admired the "basic dictatorship" of Red China, in response to a question about what country he admired the most. His father, who had been head of a delegation of Canadian Communists invited to a summit in the Soviet Union back in the days of Stalin, was noted for expressing similar sentiments. He gushed and fawned over the Chinese dictatorship at a time when Mao Tse-Tung himself was still dictator. Would it be racist to ask of Captain Airhead if he is serving Red China rather than Canada?

"That's different", the lynch mob will scream.

Why is it different?

The only discernible difference is that Captain Airhead is lily white, with a French last name, and is descended from French and English Canadian stock. Dr. Tam is of Asian race and Chinese ethnicity. She was born in Hong Kong, however, when it was still a Dependant Territory of the United Kingdom and she was raised in the UK. This is not a background likely to result in allegiance to the Communist regime in Beijing.

"That's our point exactly", I can hear the blood-thirsty anti-Sloan gang, crying.

Yes, but you are missing mine.

The reason the question with regards to Dr. Tam is valid, is not because of her race and ethnicity, but because of her connection to the World Health Organization. The WHO is led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who previous to his current gig, was a high-ranking official in a murderous, genocidal, ethno-Communist regime in Ethiopia in the crimes against humanity of which he was fully participant, and who owes his new position to the Chinese regime. From the very beginning of this coronavirus outbreak the WHO has been acting as if it were the official propaganda organ of the Communist Party of China. At first, when China was downplaying the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan, and silencing those who tried to speak out, the WHO simply repeated what the Chinese government was telling them. Then, when they sealed off Hubei province from the rest of China and world leaders such as Donald Trump in the United States began to take notice of what was going on, the WHO ridiculed the idea that travel in and out of China might not be safe and should be restricted. Dr. Tam, who has been a member of multiple WHO committees and who was named Canada's Chief Public Health Officer two weeks minus one day before Tedros Adhanom took over the WHO is part of the WHO's oversight committee on health emergencies like this one. She is a member of the committee that recommended against travel restrictions. She told Canadians at the time that we were at low risk from this disease. Finally, when the virus had spread around the globe and the WHO declared a pandemic, it advised its member nations to follow Red China's example in containing the virus, by imposing essentially Communist restrictions on movement, association, and assembly on their entire populations. The countries that ignored the WHO's advice every step of the way are the countries that have handled the pandemic the best.. Multiple governments around the world are now demanding an investigation into the WHOs behaviour. The Communist regime in China is "firmly opposed" to such an independent review. Note that the countries that ignored the WHO from the beginning of the COVID-19 panic were for the most part the countries that were hit the hardest by the first SARS outbreak in 2002-2005. The Kingdom of Sweden which had only five cases and no deaths from the original SARS is an exception. The Dominion of Canada is the exception in the other direction. We had the most cases of SARS and deaths from SARS of any non-Asian country. Yet, unlike Taiwan and Singapore, we have been slavishly obeying every dictate of the WHO. It is entirely reasonable to think that our Chief Public Health Officer's being on the committee that decides WHO recommendations might be the reason for that. This very weekend she has been regurgitating the WHO's warnings against relying on "herd immunity" despite that strategy's having worked for Sweden, and a lot better than the WHO strategy has been working elsewhere.

Derek Sloan's question is both valid and appropriate.

Captain Airhead was quoted by the Globe and Mail as saying that Mr. Sloan's remarks "have no place in our country."

On the contrary, it is Captain Airhead's totalitarian attitude - that those who think differently from him on matters such as these have no place here - that truly does not belong in Canada, or any other free Commonwealth realm. He should take his crummy attitude somewhere where it does belong. Like Communist China for example.