Tag Archives: Brian Pallister

Manitoba is now up the Creek, Without a Paddle, in a Leaky Kinew

Posted on by

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Saturday, October 7, 2023

Manitoba is now up the Creek, Without a Paddle, in a Leaky Kinew

 I have said before that I think we Canadians owe our Sovereign, now His Majesty Charles III, although when I made the remark originally it was our late Sovereign Lady of blessed memory, Elizabeth II, an apology for the incompetent, utterly corrupt, and insanely evil clown who, through our abuse of our voting privilege, has been Prime Minister of this Commonwealth Realm for the last eight years.   Now I would add that the Canadians of my province, Manitoba, owe a double apology for putting the only politician in the Dominion worse than Captain Airhead himself into the premier’s office, with a majority in the Legislature behind him.

When the evil New Democratic Party led by the execrable Wab Kinew won the provincial election on 3 October, I was disgusted but not surprised.   When Lee Harding of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a local think-tank here in Winnipeg, published a piece on 29 September calling for the re-election of the Progressive Conservatives, I could not agree with his title as much as I desired that outcome.   The title was “Manitoba PCs Deserve Another Mandate”.   No, they did not.   The reason for voting PC this election was not that they deserved it but that the alternative was much, much, worse.

The Progressive Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, won the provincial election of 2016 and governed well enough in their first term that Harding’s title would have been true had he written his article in 2019.   That year they won re-election and at the annual New Year’s Levée hosted by the Lieutenant Governor I shook Pallister’s hand and congratulated him on his victory.   Within a few months of this, however, Pallister’s governance went south badly and I came to loathe the man.   In July of 2021, a short time before he resigned as PC leader and premier, I expressed this in these words:

Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!

He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!

His one and only virtue,

I hate to say it but it’s true,

His one and only virtue is –

He’s not Wab Kinew!

It was Pallister’s handling of the bat flu scare that had so soured me on his governance.   He had imposed a particularly harsh lockdown, had done so earlier than many other provinces, and had done so in an arrogant, in-your-face, manner.   Wab Kinew and the NDP criticized Pallister’s handling of the pandemic, but their criticism went entirely in the wrong direction.   They criticized Pallister for not imposing lockdowns sooner, not making them harsher, lifting them too early and this sort of thing.   They should have been criticizing Pallister for trampling all over the most basic rights and freedoms of Manitobans, that is to say our ancient Common Law rights and freedoms not the useless and empty guarantees of Pierre Trudeau’s Charter, and acting like there are no constitutional limits to the power of government in an emergency.   Their mishandling of the bat flu panic under Pallister is the reason the PC’s don’t deserve another mandate.   Kinew’s criticism of the same, which amounted to a demand that Pallister do more of what he was doing wrong, is one reason why the NDP do not deserve to replace the PC’s as government and are a much worse alternative.

It was not the botched job he made of the bat flu that ultimately brought about Pallister’s resignation as PC leader and premier at the beginning of September 2021.   This was 2021, and the crazy progressive leftists who dominate so much of the Canadian mainstream media, envious as always of their counterparts in the United States, decided that Canada needed her version of the George Floyd controversy that had been manufactured by the BLM Movement – the movement for whom the lives of American blacks matter the least because their target is the American police who protect American blacks from the violent crime that costs so many blacks their lives each year – and so jumped on the discovery of ground disturbances – and that was all that were discovered – on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which the band interpreted as the discovery of unmarked graves – not “mass graves” as falsely reported – and began claiming that this “proved” the version of the Indian Residential Schools narrative that defrocked United Church minister and conspiracy theorist Kevin Annett has been spouting since the 1990s, i.e., that children were murdered by the thousands in the schools and buried in secret graves.   Imagine if the mainstream media in the UK were to start reporting David Icke’s theory that the world is controlled by reptilian shapeshifters from outer space and you will have an approximation of the degree of departure from journalistic standards and integrity that was involved here.   Their claim has since been thoroughly debunked, which is why leftist politicians now want to criminalize debunking it, but it had its intended effect.   That summer saw the biggest wave of hate crimes in Canadian history as Church buildings – whether the Churches had any connection to the residential schools or not – were burned or otherwise vandalized all across the country.   On Dominion Day, Year Zero, Cultural Maoist terrorists, toppled the statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature.   No society can afford to tolerate this sort of violent, seditious, assault on her history and civilization and Brian Pallister appropriately condemned these acts.   In doing so he made positive statements about the previous generations of Canadians who settled and built the country and who are now constantly being defamed by progressive academics and journalists, in violation of the fifth and ninth commandments.   The provincial Indian chiefs decided to take offense at this – take offense is the operative phrase, as none was given, Pallister had not said anything about them, negative or otherwise – and demanded that Pallister apologize.  Pallister should have told them to go suck an egg and stood his ground.   Instead, about a month later, he cravenly gave them the apology they didn’t deserve, and in the event didn’t accept, and shortly thereafter resigned.

Kelvin Goertzen took over as interim party leader and premier until the party held its leadership vote on 30 October.   Now, I am not a fan of this method of choosing a party leader.   I think that it is far more consistent with our parliamentary form of government for the party caucus – the party’s sitting members in the House of Commons or provincial legislative assembly – to choose their leader, and that selling paid memberships in the party with a vote for the leader attached smacks of the American republican system.   I also dislike the way our elections, Dominion and provincial, are now treated by almost everyone as if we were directly voting for the prime minister or premier, rather than voting for our local representatives in a larger parliamentary assembly, for the same reason.   This is a consequence of being inundated with too much American culture in the form of television and movies.   That having been said, if the party leader is to be chosen this way, it should at least be open and honest.   That is precisely what the vote that put Heather Stefanson in as leader of Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives and premier of the province was not.   Stefanson was the candidate supported by the sitting members – had the party chosen its leader according to my preferred method she would have still become leader.   She was also, however, the candidate that the backroom bosses of the party wanted as leader, and when they ultimately got their way their new leader had a huge cloud of suspicion of shenanigans over her head.   Stefanson won the leadership vote by a narrow margin – 51.1% over the 48.9% received by Shelly Glover, which looks even narrower in total vote count – 8, 405 for Stefanson, 8, 042 for Glover.   Glover, who had formerly been a member of the House of Commons representing St. Boniface, based her campaign in part on dissatisfaction with how Pallister, with whose government Stefanson had been associated, had handled the bat flu.   The party’s former CFO, Ken Lee, had also sought the leadership, in his case making opposition the Pallister lockdowns his sole issue, but his candidacy was disqualified for reasons that never really were made clear.   This looked shady, as did the fact that over 1200 members had not received their ballots in time to vote, and when Glover lost by such a narrow margin – less than 400 votes – she contested the outcome, but her challenge was quickly dismissed.    This had all the appearances of a backroom fix.

When this happened I realized that it would take a miracle for the Progressive Conservatives to win the next election.   You cannot treat your voting base this way and expect them to turn up in sufficient numbers to support you come election time.

It was apparent during the short election campaign, and the longer pre-campaign leading up to it, that Stefanson’s PCs were not remotely as committed to their winning the election as their enemies were to their being defeated.   I say enemies rather than opponents because it is not just their rivals in the legislature that I am talking about.

The unions have been determined to take down the PCs since pretty much the moment Brian Pallister became premier and have really stepped up their game in the last couple of years.   They have spent a fortune on billboard ads all over Winnipeg attacking the PC government.   Then there are the yard signs that began popping up like mushrooms all over the place long before the party campaign signs came out.   These couldn’t explicitly endorse candidate or party, but everyone knew what they were getting at.  The most common such signs were from the Manitoba Nurses Union and the Manitoba Teachers Society.  

Allied with these unions in their quest to bring down the PCs and put Kinew’s NDP into government, was the media, especially the CBC, which as Crown broadcaster by rights ought to be neutral, and the Winnipeg Free Press.     

These media, along with the Manitoba Nurses Union and the NDP, have been using health care as a club to bash the Progressive Conservatives with ever since Pallister, early in his premiership, indicated his disagreement with them that health care spending needs to keep going in one direction only, up, converted the Emergency Rooms at Seven Oaks and Victoria Hospitals in Winnipeg into urgent care centres, and closed the Concordia Hospital ER refocusing the hospital to transitional care for the elderly and those undergoing physical rehabilitation.   The PCs dropped the ball on this one.   They should have hammered back, just as hard, pointing out that the consultant’s report on whose recommendations they did this had been commissioned by the previous, NDP, government, and that at the same time they expanded the capacity of the three remaining ERs – Health Sciences Centre, St. Boniface, and Grace.   They should also have emphasized that health care has usually fared much worse under NDP governments in rural ridings.   The ER in Vita, a rural community about an hour and a half south-east of Winnipeg, closed three years after Greg Selinger became premier.  Two years later it was still closed, with eighteen others along with it.    ERs in many other rural communities remained open, but on a basis somewhat like a multi-point parish, with the same doctor serving several ERs, being in the one the one day, another the next.   In the second last year of Gary Doer’s premiership, the ER in Virden, a rural community along the TransCanada Highway near the Saskatchewan border was temporarily closed, mercifully for only about half a year.   These examples are representative, not comprehensive, and while the rural doctor shortage is a chronic problem regardless of who is in government, rural areas always fare worse under the NDP.  Not coincidentally, these same areas rarely if at all vote NDP.   A rural ER closure, even a temporary one, is worse than an ER closure in Winnipeg, for while there are more people in Winnipeg, the transit time to the next ER, especially if the ER to close is one that serviced a very large area, like the one in Vita, is increased that much more in the country.

The media also found another club to bash the PC government with in the Indians’ demand that the Prairie Green Landfill be searched for the remains of two murdered women that the Winnipeg Police believe to have ended up there.   This demand was expressed in protests, blockades, and something that is probably best described as a riot, earlier this year.   Here again, Stefanson’s PCs shot themselves in the foot.   Not so much by refusing the demand – their grounds for doing so were sound, and certainly not the “racism” of which idiots accuse them – but by bringing the issue into the election campaign.   No matter how sound the case for not conducting this just under $200 million search of an area laced with toxins, there was no way Stefanson could argue her point without appearing heartless.  It would have been better to stay silent.

So, no, the Stefanson PC’s did not deserve another mandate.   The problem is that those who won deserved it even less.

Let me spell it out for you.   At the moment, people all across the Dominion of Canada are experiencing an affordability crisis.   The price of food has gone through the roof.   Many Canadians are skipping meals, many others are buying less healthy processed food than they otherwise would, because the prices at the grocery stores are too high.   At the same time rent is sky high and houses are selling at obscene prices.   Transportation is also that much more expensive.   Much of this is the direct consequence of bad action on the part of the Dominion government.   The price of gasoline has gone up considerably due to the carbon tax, which in turn increases the price of everything that needs to be transported using fuel.  The housing shortage is a direct consequence of Captain Airhead’s decision to use record immigration, with apologies to Bertolt Brecht, to elect a new people.   While Captain Airhead seems to think that food prices are high because of price fixing on the part of the big grocery chains, a notion he borrowed from the man propping his minority government up, federal NDP leader Jimmy Dhaliwal, the fact of the matter is that he has been spending like a drunken sailor since he got into office.   When governments spend more than they take in in revenue, this is not a contributing factor to inflation, it is inflation.   The extra they spend increases the supply of money, the means of exchange, which decreased the value of money per unit, and causes the price of everything else to rise relative to it.    When you spend the way Captain Airhead did over the last few years, paying people to stay home for long periods of time and not go to work – decreasing the production of goods and services and thus causing their cost in currency to go up – you increase inflation exponentially.   Manitoba just elected a premier who has the same sort of attitude towards spending as Captain Airhead.  

Last month, in the Million Person March, organized by Ottawa Muslim activist Kamel El-Cheik, but supported by many faith groups and people just concerned about the rights of parents, Canadians across the Dominion expressed what polls already had indicated to be the overwhelming majority opinion of Canadians – that schools should not be keeping parents out of the loop about what is going on in the classroom with their kids about gender identity and that sort of thing.   While leftists have tried to spin this as an alphabet soup issue, accusing those protesting of various sorts of hatred and bigotry, and spinning the reasonable insistence that teachers entrusted with the education of children report back to the parents who so entrusted them, as “forced outing”, they are being absurd.   There is a word for someone who tells kids to keep stuff having to do with sex a secret from their parents.   The policy that schools and school boards have been following in recent years seems tailor-made to accommodate such people.   Heather Stefanson had promised in her campaign to protect parental rights.   The promise would have been more credible had she introduced the legislation to do so earlier when the New Brunswick and Saskatchewan governments were doing so.   However, this much is clear, if someone wanted to protect perverts in the schools rather than the rights of parents, he would be cheering the outcome of this election.

The province already has a huge problem with drug abuse and related social evils.   The CBC reported in April that provincial Chief Medical Examiner had told them via e-mail that the number of drug-related deaths per year has “risen dramatically here in recent years” and that “the deaths are only the tip of the iceberg”.   407 Manitobans died from overdoses in 2021, 372 the year previously, both record numbers.   It was at least 418 in 2022.    At least 228 involved fentanyl and/or related drugs.   The city of Winnipeg also saw the largest jump in crime severity of any Canadian city in the same period.   These two facts are not unrelated, nor is the size of the homelessness problem in Winnipeg.    The left, in recent years, has been obsessed with the “harms reduction” approach to this matter, an approach that tries to lower the number of deaths due to overdose and contamination by providing a “safe” supply of drugs and “safe” places to use them.   It is usually coupled with decriminalization or outright legalization of some or all narcotics.   This approach is concerned more with the effects of drugs on those who (ab)use them and less or not at all with the effects of drug abuse on the surrounding community.   It was tried by the NDP in Alberta in the premiership of Rachel Notley, and more dramatically in British Columbia, where the provincial NDP government introduced this approach on a provincial scale earlier at the beginning of this year, despite it having proven a failure when the city of Vancouver tried it, causing overdose deaths to rise.   The NDP are incapable of learning from their mistakes on matters such as these.   Expect Kinew to try and imitate BC’s mistake, not avoid it and look elsewhere, like, for example, Singapore’s “harm prevention” approach, for a successful model.    This problem is about to get much worse in Winnipeg and Manitoba.

It will not be long before we in Manitoba rue the outcome of this election. Now we owe His Majesty a double apology, first for Captain Airhead in the Dominion Prime Minister’s Office, now for Captain Airhead’s doppleganger in the province of Manitoba. — Gerry T. Neal

Pallister is Under Attack for All the Wrong Reasons

Posted on by

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, July 23, 2021

Pallister is Under Attack for All the Wrong Reasons

I don’t like Brian Pallister who is the premier of my province, Manitoba, very much.   Oh, I was very glad to see him replace Greg Selinger in that office, voted for the Progressive Conservative party which he leads in the last two provincial elections, and even congratulated him in person on his re-election, but I was never particularly enthusiastic about his leadership qualities.    In March of last year, I lost most of my respect for the man when he locked down the province harder than almost anywhere else in Canada before the bat flu had even really arrived here and did so by holding a press conference in which he arrogantly rubbed the heavy-handedness of his approach in all of our faces.  In the year and a half since then, he has whittled away at what little of that respect remained by such behaviour as scapegoating ordinary Manitobans for the failure of the dictatorial public health orders of his power-mad public health mandarin Brent Roussin, setting up a snitch line and encouraging Manitobans to spy on their friends, family, and neighbours and rat them out for violations of these petty public health orders, showing complete and utter disregard for constitutional protections of Manitobans’ basic freedoms and rights, blasphemously raising himself to the level of God by adding an eleventh commandment to the Decalogue, and, most recently, using the means of bribery and blackmail to coerce Manitobans to give up their right to not be medicated against their freely given, informed, consent.

I have expressed my present attitude towards the premier in the following lines of verse:

Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!

He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!

His one and only virtue,

I hate to say it but it’s true,

His one and only virtue is –

He’s not Wab Kinew!

That having been said, Pallister has come under heavy attack this month for reasons that have nothing to do with the draconian way in which ran roughshod over all our rights and freedoms in order to swat the bat flu bug.   On Dominion Day an angry, lawless, mob descended upon the grounds of the provincial legislature here in Winnipeg.   The mob was not angrily demanding the restoration of our rights and freedoms and small businesses and social lives.   They were mad, in both senses of the word, because for the month previous far left activists masquerading as journalists, that is to say, most of the mainstream media in Canada, had been using the discovery of graves that are currently without markers near former Indian Residential Schools to defame Canada, her founders and historical leaders, the Christian religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and white people in general, in a most vile and disgusting manner.    The mob vandalized and tore down the large statue of Queen Victoria that had stood in front of the legislature as well as a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II that had stood near the Lieutenant Governor’s residence.   Since Queen Victoria was the queen who signed the bill that established Canada as a country, Queen Elizabeth II is the present reigning monarch and this was done on the country’s anniversary this was an obvious assault on the very idea of Canada herself.

Pallister, quite rightly, expressed his “disgust and disappointment” at these actions, condemning them both at the time and in a press conference the following Wednesday.   At the latter he said that the statues would be restored.   He also said, with regards to the early settlers of Canada “the people came here to this country, before it was a country and since, didn’t come here to destroy anything, they came here to build, they came to build better and build they did.   They built farms and they built businesses, they built communities and churches too.   They built these things for themselves and one another and they built them with dedication and with pride and so we must dedicate ourselves to building yet again”.  This is what his enemies wish to crucify him for saying.  Much to his credit, he has so far stood by his remarks.

In these comments Pallister depicted those who settled here and built what became the country Canada as having been human beings rather than devils.   This is what the far left finds so unforgiveable.  The fundamental essence of the political left, its sine qua non, is the envious hatred of those who build, especially those who have built in the past those things we enjoy and benefit from as a legacy in the present, which envious hatred manifests itself as efforts to tear down and destroy.    They have to think of the builders of the past as devils in order to avoid the suspicion that they themselves are such.

The media, which everywhere but perhaps especially in Canada is largely synonymous with the political left, has framed the controversy which it has itself generated over Pallister’s remarks in racial and ethnic terms.   What is implied, or in some cases practically stated outright, in all the criticism and condemnation of Pallister’s words, is that speaking positively of the European, Christian, settlers who came to what is now Canada over the last four to five centuries and of their accomplishments rather than demonizing them is insensitive and offensive to Native Indian Canadians.   We are essentially being told that our country, her history, and her founders and historical figures from the early settlers through the Fathers of Confederation to the present day, must only be spoken of in terms of shame, that everything we have historically celebrated about our country must be forgotten, and that we must instead forever be beating ourselves up over the Indian Residential Schools.   Should there be anyone left in Canada still capable of thinking at the level of an adult, such a person must surely recognize that it is this attitude on the part of the progressive media rather than Pallister’s speech that is truly demeaning to the Natives as it treats them as thin-skinned bigots who cannot hear anyone other than themselves spoken of positively without taking it as an insult to themselves.   It also suggests that they are incapable of telling when the left is cynically exploiting their suffering for its own interests.  The attack on the symbols of the monarchy serves the cause of the left since republicanism, whatever J. J. McCullough, Anthony Furey, Spencer Fernando, Lorne Gunter, and the average American “conservative” may think to the contrary, is essentially left-wing, but it is difficult to see how an attack on the only Canadian symbol that unites all Canadians – aboriginal, English, French, and newer immigrants – could genuinely serve the interests of Native people. (1)

I will note here, for whatever it is worth, that on the day of Pallister’s press conference, the first attack on his words that I came across was on the local CBC.    The segment, which was formatted as a news report although it was in reality an editorial, was by a well-known local reporter and featured as an “expert” a man on the faculty of the University of Manitoba who was described, amusingly in my opinion, as a historian.   Both men are notorious for their left wing views, both are lily white, and both have British-Scandanavian family names.   The following day both the Association of Manitoba Chiefs and the Southern Chiefs Organization issued press releases condemning Pallister and his remarks which it would probably have been fairer to these organizations to not have mentioned as the bigoted and ill-informed terms in which they are written do them no credit whatsoever, but white leftists appear to have been the ones that got the ball rolling on this anti-Pallister campaign.

That ball has been picking up speed ever since.   Helping it along have been a number of defections from Pallister’s Cabinet and staff, starting with the resignation of Eileen Clarke who had been Minister of Indigenous and Municipal Relations.   The portfolio was then given to Alan Lagimodiere, the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Selkirk.  Although Lagimodiere is Metis, his appointment has not exactly improved the situation for Pallister as he began his opening speech in this office by saying that those who established the Residential Schools “thought they were doing the right thing”.   This is, as Colby Cosh has pointed out, “a flat factual truth”.   Obviously, a great many Canadians today are of the opinion that they were not doing the right thing.   Ordinarily, when people in one era do something that they think is right and people of a later era, with the benefit of hindsight, conclude that what was done was actually wrong, the latter do not refuse to credit the former for the sincerity of their intentions.   In this case, however, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has so poisoned the well of discussion with its interpretation of the schools as a “cultural genocide”, a vile expression which is a dishonest, morally outrageous, Marxist trick by which cultural assimilation, whatever one might think about it, is treated as if it were the equivalent of mass murder, which it is not, that it is impossible to speak the truth Lagimodiere spoke without provoking an irrational, emotion-driven, backlash.     Needless to say, matters have not been helped by the mainstream media’s having, in what constitutes criminal incitement that has spawned a massive wave of hate crimes, spun the discovery of graves lacking markers near the former Indian Residential Schools into a malicious blood libel against our country and her churches.   Lagimodiere was quickly interrupted by Wab Kinew, the present leader of the provincial socialists who ever since taking over that role from Selinger has been making his predecessor look better by comparison, a rather difficult undertaking indeed.     My personal opinion of Kinew you can probably deduce from the verse about Pallister above.  Kinew, applying the current left wing dogma that nothing positive must ever be said about the Residential Schools and those who established and ran them, a dogma which if applied retroactively would condemn even Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair, told Lagimodiere that he could not do the job to which he had appointed while thinking the way he does.

Since then, there have been more resignations, more condemnations and ultimatums from the chiefs, and more calls from the progressive media for Pallister to step down.

If only all of this were in response to what he has done wrong – suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms, treating in-person social interaction which is both bonum in se and absolutely essential to our wellbeing as if it were a crime, destroying small local businesses, declaring religion and worship to be non-essential but places that peddle mind-destroying , highly addictive, substances to be essential, basically turning the province into a police state for a year and a half, and holding normal life ransom in order to bully us all into accepting a medical treatment whether we have made informed decisions as to whether the benefits sufficiently outweigh the risks or not – rather than to what he has done right – refusing to go along with the wholesale demonization of Canada, her European Christian settlers, and her historical founders and leaders, by the left which can only ever tear down and never build up, the media that is so totally in its thrall, and those Native leaders who have shortsightedly joined forces with the left.

(1)   English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists who parted ways with the Americans by declaring their loyalty to the monarchy when the Americans rebelled and became republicans.  It was the Crown’s guarantee of protection of French culture, civil law, language and the Roman Catholic religion in Quebec following the Seven Year’s War that preserved French Canadian identity and kept French Canada loyal during the American revolution and down through Confederation in which all the French Canadian Fathers joined the English Fathers in unanimous support for making the new country a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic.  The Crown is the other signatory to the Indian treaties – Queen Victoria, whose statue was so insultingly treated by the left wing mob, was the reigning monarch when most of these treaties were made.   All new comers to Canada from whatever other country and background have sworn loyalty to the monarch and her heirs to become citizens.  Therefore the monarchy is the one and only national symbol that belongs to all Canadians, albeit in different ways, and thus unites them.    To attack this symbol as a symbol of “imperialism” and “colonialism” in the derogatory sense which Marxists attach to these words is to insult all Canadians of all races, religions, and languages.

Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 3:12 AM

Free Max!

Posted on by

Free Max!

O sick Canada—sick country just plain SICK



People’s Party of Canada Leader, Maxime Bernier was arrested in Manitoba Friday!

After the first stop on his “Mad Max Manitoba Tour” in the small town of Niverville, he had been fined and threatened with arrest.

Just an hour later, RCMP officers arrested him outside the village of St-Pierre-Jolys, where he had just spoken to a crowd of supporters.

Maxime knew that by going to Manitoba he was going up against the provincial despot Brian Pallister, and that arrest was a real possibility.

He still did it, because Maxime deeply believes in freedom.

He has shown he has the courage and bravery to do what’s right.

Maxime Bernier, a political leader, was wrongfully arrested on charges that violate his constitutional rights as a Canadian citizen.

Section 2(c) of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to peaceful assembly.

This isn’t about COVID-19 anymore. It’s political oppression.

He was arrested for opposing the unjustified, unscientific, and disastrous lockdown measures that have been imposed on Canadians for over 15 months.

That’s the kind of stuff countries like China and Russia do.

Did you ever think Canada would turn into a place where there are political prisoners?

This is not the Canada we know and love.

Ted, we’re the only political party in Canada fighting for your freedom!

Will you help our cause with a donation of $20 today, or whatever you can afford, for the sake of this country?

Thank you for your continued support!
-PPC Team

P.S.: It’s possible that Maxime will be in jail for several days. Check our social media accounts for regular updates on Maxime’s situation in the coming hours and days.

Share

Party Leader & Former MP Maxime Bernier, Handcuffed & Arrested for Attending an END THE LOCKDOWN Rally in China? — NO! IN MANITOBA!

Posted on by

People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier arrested by RCMP in Manitoba

Social Sharing

Bernier attended rally against COVID-19 restrictions held in southern Manitoba village

[Pyongyang on the Prairies. Human rights — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly — brutalized and trampled. A former Member of Parliament arrested and handcuffed for attending a non-violent rally. Hope Pol Pot Pallister is proud. — Paul Fromm]

Caitlyn Gowriluk · CBC News · Posted: Jun 11, 2021 2:49 PM CT | Last Updated: 24 minutes ago

Maxime Bernier was taken into custody by Manitoba RCMP after attending a rally protesting COVID-19 restrictions on Friday in St-Pierre-Jolys, Man. (Laïssa Pamou/SRC)

People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier was arrested after appearing at a sparsely attended rally against COVID-19 restrictions in a southern Manitoba village on Friday afternoon.

Radio-Canada’s Laïssa Pamou who was covering the event said the rally in St-Pierre-Jolys, which is about 57 kilometres south of Winnipeg, saw no more than 15 people in attendance. After the event ended, Bernier got into a vehicle to head to a rally in nearby St. Malo, another small, rural community.

That’s when he was pulled out of the vehicle by Mounties who handcuffed him and put him in the back seat of an RCMP vehicle. 

Bernier spoke to Radio-Canada shortly before he was detained and said he got a ticket for violating public health orders at a rally in the nearby town of Niverville earlier Friday. He did not say how much he was fined — just that he planned to fight it.

An RCMP spokesperson confirmed Bernier was ticketed earlier in the day.

“It is the duty of the RCMP to enforce the laws of Manitoba, and those include public health orders. Mr. Bernier knew of the health orders and has already received a ticket. The continuation of the offence of violating the current public health orders in Manitoba has resulted in his arrest,” Tara Seel said in an email.

WATCH | Bernier arrested in Manitoba:

People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier taken into custody by RCMP in Manitoba

8 hours ago0:25People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier was handcuffed and put in the back of an RCMP vehicle after attending a rally against COVID-19 restrictions in St-Pierre-Jolys, Man., on Friday afternoon. 0:25

Bernier was charged under the Public Health Act for assembling in a gathering at an outdoor public place and for failing to self-isolate once he got to Manitoba, and he will appear before a magistrate, Seel said.

Manitoba Justice said it would not comment on how long Bernier might be held and also would not say when he might appear before the magistrate, as his case is now before the courts.

The penalties section of Manitoba’s Public Health Act states the maximum sanction is a $100,000 fine, one year in jail or both.  

Bernier had announced a tour of southern Manitoba this weekend that was set to include several stops at anti-lockdown rallies in spite of pandemic restrictions banning large events and requiring people to self-isolate when entering the province if they’re not fully vaccinated. 

Bernier’s appearances in Niverville and St-Pierre-Jolys were the first two rallies listed on an itinerary posted on Facebook that was supposed to see him stop in the rural cities of Morden and Winkler later Friday.

He was also scheduled to appear in the communities of La Salle and Lorette, as well as in Winnipeg on Saturday, then in the cities of Steinbach and Selkirk on Sunday, according to the itinerary.

Rights violated, party claims

People’s Party of Canada spokesperson Martin Masse said in a statement Bernier was “wrongfully arrested” on charges that violate his charter rights. 

“This isn’t about COVID anymore. It’s political repression. This is the kind of stuff countries like China and Russia do,” Masse said. 

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms said in a news release that it will appear in court on Bernier’s behalf. 

The Calgary-based organization has also been involved in challenges of lockdown measures across the country, including one in Manitoba that saw seven churches take the province to court over its pandemic powers. No decision has been issued yet in that challenge.

A provincial spokesperson previously told CBC News that the province was aware of Bernier’s planned rallies and would be conducting surveillance to gather video and other evidence.

At a news conference on Thursday morning, Premier Brian Pallister said Bernier would be “light in the pocket book” if he planned on violating Manitoba’s public health orders.

Manitoba Trucker Jake Klassen for Organizing A Singing Session for Christmas Hymns in a Public Park

Posted on by

Manitoba Trucker Jake Klassen for Organizing A Singing Session for Christmas Hymns in a Public Park

Brian Pallister, Manitoba’s conservative-in-name-only premier, recently imposed strict lockdown measures on his entire province, including the closure of anything he deems “non-essential” — and according to him, you’re an “idiot” if you disagree with his decision. 

His new rules make the town in “Footloose” look like a bastion of freedom! 

Among Pallister’s many authoritarian decrees is the closure of all churches in Manitoba. And singing, apparently. 

That’s why we are helping Jake Klassen from Reinfeld, Manitoba. Jake organized a singing service in a public park where people could gather (2 metres apart) to sing Christmas carols and Christian hymns. 

They were there spreading Christmas cheer while socially distancing in an empty park. How can there possibly be anything wrong with that? 

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the very next day, the cops showed up and handed Jake a $1,296 fine! 

For singing Christmas carols in the park? It’s insane! 

You can watch Jake’s story right here:

Trucker fined $1,296 by Manitoba cops for outdoor Christian carol-singing

We won’t rest until we challenge every single one of these fines and win our freedom back! 

That’s why we launched an ambitious plan to fight the fines for the first 1,000 Canadians who have been issued a coronavirus ticket. 

We don’t plan to pay Jake’s fine — we’re going to fight it! And we’re hoping we can count on you to help us crowdfund Jake’s lawyer.

Rebel News hired David Anber, an excellent civil liberties lawyer, to represent Jake. David has been on the front lines with many of our other “Fight the Fines” cases, so we know Jake is in great hands. 

We’re taking a stand to defend our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, like the freedom to run a business, visit our family, practice our religion, and SING when and where we want to. But we can’t win this fight alone, and we’ll need as much help as we can get.  

To support our fight, please go to www.FightTheFines.com and help us out with a donation. Whether it’s $5, $50, or $500, every little bit will help us fight Jake’s case and all the other cases we’ve taken on. 

And if someone you know received one of these lockdown fines, send them our way, and we’ll work to get them a lawyer too.

Yours truly, 

Sheila Gunn Reid 

Medico-Stalinist Anti-Christian Police State — Church CHARGED $6,000 for DRIVE-IN services; bylaw wait until Media Party leaves to issue tickets

Posted on by

Medico-Stalinist Anti-Christian Police State — Church CHARGED $6,000 for DRIVE-IN services; bylaw wait until Media Party leaves to issue tickets

Church CHARGED $6,000 for DRIVE-IN services; bylaw wait until Media Party leaves to issue tickets

The Church of God, just south of Steinbach, MB, has met the cold rubber of Brian Pallister’s cold boot.

On Sunday, the widely disliked premier dispatched uniformed officers with “Manitoba Justice” emblazoned on their backs to the small church in the countryside.

The Church of God cancelled indoor services this weekend, out of an abundance of caution. Instead, church leadership asked congregants to remain in their vehicles outside, and tune in to 88.5 FM.

Over the radio and in the safety of their cars, churchgoers listened to the weekly sermon. The church’s minister preached to the gathered faithful about the origin of liberty, and that rights pre-exist government and are granted to men by God.

It was a short service, but the way the province saw it, their disobedience could not go unpunished. And punished they were. Over $6,000 dollars in fines were issued to the church and its minister, Tobias Tissen.

Prior to Sunday, Tissen was threatened with 12 months of imprisonment for practicing his religion, in a letter issued by the province.

The RCMP did not decide to arrest Tissen, which is when the Manitoba Health and Manitoba Justice (both departments directly reporting to Premier Pallister’s cabinet) moved in to issue their vindictive punishment.

This comes a week after pollsters announced Brian Pallister is the most disliked premier in Canada, and days after Pallister called every Manitoban who didn’t agree with him “an idiot.”

Roussin’s Victims

Posted on by

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Roussin’s Victims

The province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, one of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Commonwealth Realms, is my home.   We have seen two types of protests directed against the provincial government in recent months, both objecting to the province’s response to the spread of the Wuhan bat flu.   One type of protest, such as that which took place in Steinbach on the 14th of November, expresses opposition to the public health orders as trampling all over our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion and our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights.   The other type of protest expressed the views of the socialist opposition party, its leader Wab Kinew and his health critic, and their far left echo chamber in the media which features such automatons as the CBC’s Bartley Kives and the Winnipeg Free Press’s Dan Lett and Ryan Thorpe.   Those involved in this type of protest take the position that the government’s public health orders have been too few, too light, and too slowly enacted, and that the government by not imposing a harsh lockdown the moment the case numbers started to rise in the fall, is responsible for all the deaths we have seen since September.

My sympathies are entirely with the first group of protesters, as anyone who has read a word I have previously written on the subject already knows.   I should say that my sympathies are with the protesters’ basic position.   I don’t much care for the rhetoric of civil disobedience, rebellion, and populism in which that position is often expressed at those protests.

While the second group of protesters are certainly entitled to their opinion and the free expression of the same, a freedom that I note many if not most of them would prefer to deny to me and others who take my side of the issue, their position is easily debunked from an ethical point of view.

When a virus is spreading, government is not required to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread.   Indeed, it has a moral obligation NOT to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread of the virus.   This is because the government has the power to do tremendous evil as well as good.

Let us agree that saving lives that are at risk from the virus is in itself a good and worthy goal.   Stopping and slowing the spread of the virus may be a means to that end, but whether it is a good means to a good end or a bad means to a good end is debatable.  Slowing the spread of the virus increases the total length of the pandemic, stretching out the time we have to deal with this plague over a much longer period than would otherwise be the case.   That can hardly be regarded as desirable in itself.   Quite the contrary in fact.   Whether this is an acceptable evil, worth tolerating in order to achieve the end of lives saved, depends upon a couple of considerations.

First it depends upon the effectiveness of the method of slowing the spread of the virus in saving lives.   If the method is not effective, then the evil of artificially lengthening the period of the pandemic is much less tolerable.

Second it depends upon the means whereby the stopping or slowing of the virus, considered as an end itself, is to be accomplished.   If those means are themselves bad, this compounds the evil of stretching out the pandemic.

Neither of these considerations provides much in the way of support for concluding that a longer pandemic is an evil made tolerable by a good end, such as saving lives.

With regards to the first consideration, it is by no means clear that any lives have been saved in this way at all.  Indeed, at the beginning of the first lockdown, back when everyone was repeating the phrase “flatten the curve” ad naseum, the experts advising this strategy told us that it would not decrease the total lives lost  but merely spread them out so that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed at once.   This, in my opinion at least, was not nearly as desirable an end as saving lives and not one sufficient to make the lockdown measures acceptable.

This brings us to our second criteria.   The means by which our government health officials have tried to slow or stop the spread of the virus are neither morally neutral nor positively good.   On the contrary, they are positively evil.  They inflict all sorts of unnecessary misery upon people.  Advocates of the lockdown method sometimes maintain that the damage inflicted is merely economic and therefore “worth it” to save lives.   This would be a dubious conclusion even if the premise were valid.   The premise is not valid, however, and it is highly unlikely that those who state it seriously believe what they are saying.  

Telling people to stay home and avoid all contact with other people does not just hurt people financially, although it certainly does that if their business is forced to close or their job is deemed by some bureaucrat to be “non-essential”.  It forces people to act against their nature as social beings, deprives them of social contact which is essential to their psychological and spiritual wellbeing, which are in turn essential to their physical wellbeing.   Mens sana in corpore sano.   The longer people are deprived of social contact, the more loneliness and a sense of isolation will erode away at their mental health.   Phone, e-mail, and even video chat, are not adequate substitutes for in-person social contact.

All of this was true of the first lockdown in the spring but it is that much more true with regards to the second lockdowns that are now being imposed.   The first lockdown was bad enough, but the second lockdown, imposed for at least a month, coming right before Christmas in the same year as the first, will be certain to pile a sense of hopelessness and despair on top of the inevitable loneliness and isolation.  The government has kept liquor stores and marijuana vendors open, even though the combination of alcohol and pot with hopelessness, loneliness, and despair is a recipe for self-destructive behaviour, while ordering all the churches, which offer, among other things, hope, to close.    This is evil of truly monstrous proportions.    It can only lead to death – whether by suicide, addictive self-destruction, or just plain heart brokenness.   

The protesters who accuse Brian Pallister and the government he leads of murder for having re-opened our economy from the first lockdown and not having imposed a second one right away when the cases began to rise are wrong-headed about the matter as they, generally being leftists, are wrong-headed about everything.   The government does not become morally culpable for deaths because it refrains from taking actions which are extremely morally wrong in themselves in order to achieve the goal of saving lives.   Not imposing a draconian lockdown does not translate into the murder of those for whom the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus becomes one health complication too many.

Where Pallister does bear moral culpability for deaths is with regards to all the people who will kill themselves, or perhaps snap and kill others, drink themselves to death or accomplish the same with drugs, or simply give up on life in hopeless gloom and despair because he has allowed Brent Roussin, once again, to impose these totalitarian public health orders.

Roussin has been going on television as of late, showing pictures of people who have died, and lecturing Manitobans on how these are not just numbers but people.   This is a kind of sleight-of-hand, by which he hopes to distract the public from all the harm he is actively causing, and he knows full well that lockdowns are themselves destructive and lethal for he admitted as much a couple of months ago thus compounding his guilt now, by manipulating their emotions.

Does Roussin realize that this street runs both ways?

What about the young man, Roussin, who would otherwise have had decades of life ahead of him, much more than those whose deaths you have been exploiting to justify your bad decisions, but who killed himself because you cancelled his job as “non-essential”, took away  his social life, and left him with the prospect of long-term isolation?   Do you not realize that he is a person as well?

In the end, those who die from the lockdown may very well turn out to outnumber by far those who succumb to the bat flu.   In which case all that Roussin will have accomplished will have been to exchange a smaller number of deaths for which he would not have been morally responsible for a larger number of deaths that leave his hands permanently stained with blood. Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 1:30 AM

Labels: addiction, Bartley Kives, Brent Roussin, Brian Pallister, CBC, COVID-19, Dan Lett, despair, hope, lockdowns, Manitoba, Ryan Thorpe, suicide, Wab Kinew, Winnipeg Free Press

2 comments:

  1. Bruce CharltonNovember 26, 2020 at 4:41 AM“In the end, those who die from the lockdown may very well turn out to outnumber by far those who succumb to the bat flu. “

    From what I can tell from the numbers William Briggs provides, this point has already, several months since, been surpassed in the UK; and the toll continues to mount.

    Plus the severity of intense and chronic human misery – perhaps especially nasty among children, teens and young adults – is clearly appalling but the extent is only known to the immediate circle of neighbours and family.

    …As would be expected from an illness with such a modest mortality rate – even accepting all the inflated and false counting – such as including all influenza deaths, and many other dishonest methods to numerous to list the inflated-rate seems to be considerably less than 1 in a 1000 and very concentrated among the old and already ill who would have a short life expectancy anyway.

    (The non-Christian’s terror of his own death, and the desire to delay it a short while at any price, has a lot to do with this.)

    Here in the UK many of the most basic aspects of medical care, such as actually meeting a doctor, diagnosing and treating lethal cancers etc, have been almost abandoned.

    However, nonetheless, there is a widespread passive acceptance and even embrace of the response – and there is no doubt that poeple-as-a-whole deserve what they are getting – since they keep asking for more of the same; and most of those who don’t like it have ne better justification for their objection than hedonism – which does not sustain courage, and offers no motivating alternative.

    This has been long coming, long building (pervasive and worsening sub-fertility among the most intelligent, wealthy and high status people being an index) – but we are now seeing an accelerating process of civilizational suicide – caused, obviously, by the denial of God (denial of any God – not only the true God).

    Even without our extraordinarily evil and psychopathic global leadership our civilization would be doomed (as I wrote in Thought Prison, 2011) – just more slowly than is happening now

    Men cannot live without God/s – even at the basic biological level; since all human societies evolved with religions, and depend upon religion for much that is basic to survival. ReplyReplies
    1. Gerry T. NealNovember 27, 2020 at 6:37 AMBruce, that we have long ago passed the point where the numbers dead from the lockdowns exceeds those dead from the virus is my understanding as well. I worded it more cautiously here because I was focusing on the local situation in Manitoba where the statistics about deaths from causes such as suicide for this year are suspiciously difficult to obtain.

      We have the same situation with regards to basic medical care here. My father has had to come into Winnipeg annually to see specialists for several years now, but both visits were cancelled this year. One of the specialists was able to do a kind of online videochat examination through the small rural hospital closest to him, but the other just postponed the visit since it has to do with an eye condition that requires an in-person examination. Someone I know who had been waiting for important surgery for years which had finally been scheduled had it postponed due to the virus. I could mention several other specific examples of this sort.

Manitoba’s “Conservative” Gov’t Hires Private Security Firm G4S to Fine Citizens & Harass Freedom Fighters: The STASI Comes to Manitoba

Posted on by

Manitoba’s “Conservative” Gov’t Hires Private Security Firm G4S to Fine Citizens & Harass Freedom Fighters: The STASI Comes to Manitoba

Manitoba hires private security firm to crack down on COVID-19 rule breakers starting this weekend

Social Sharing

Province also filing charges against Steinbach protesters, Manitoba premier says

Sarah Petz · CBC News · Posted: Nov 17, 2020 9:20 AM CT | Last Updated: November 17

Premier Brian Pallister says a private security firm will enforce Manitoba’s public health orders starting this weekend. (Gary Solilak/CBC)

Private security officers will crack down on rule breakers after shoppers crowded into big-box stores, where many bought non-essential goods during the first weekend of the province’s latest lockdown.

The province has hired security firm G4S Canada to boost its enforcement of COVID-19 regulations, and their personnel should be handing out tickets by this weekend, Premier Brian Pallister said Tuesday. 

The province is also filing charges in addition to levying fines against those who took part in a rally in Steinbach this past weekend where protesters flouted COVID-19 regulations, Pallister said.

“I believe Manitobans want to see deterrents to the kind of behaviour they saw on the weekend, and we’re going to make sure those deterrents exist,” he said. 

Pallister said he respects people’s right to peaceful protest, but those who took part in that protest put people in danger. 

“You don’t have to believe in COVID, COVID already believes in you,” he said. 

Personnel from G4S Canada are in orientation right now and will be working this weekend, Pallister said.

The staff at the security company are skilled at dealing with confrontation, which is part of the reason they were hired, Pallister said. 

“It’s a company that has people who are used to dealing with situations where, let’s just say, it’s not always pleasant … as opposed to a lot of our government employees that don’t have that experience personally,” he said.

WATCH | Premier Brian Pallister explains why G4S was hired: 

Private security company to support COVID-19 rule enforcement

20 hours agoVideo1:01Premier Brian Pallister says a private security firm will enforce Manitoba’s public health orders starting this weekend after protest drew more than 100 to Steinbach. 1:01

Band-Aid solution: MGEU

All of Manitoba was put into code red restrictions last Thursday, forcing most non-essential businesses and services to close, as the province’s caseload continues to soar. 

Essential products include groceries, personal hygiene items, hardware and household appliances.

A total of 32 tickets were issued for various offences over the last week, including for large gathering sizes, failure to quarantine and a northern travel violation, says a news release from the province.

Michelle Gawronsky, president of the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union, called the hiring of G4S a Band-Aid solution, and said the province should have done more to invest in its own workforce. 

“Though civil servants are more than willing to do their part in the fight against COVID-19 and will continue to do so, simply adding unfamiliar pandemic enforcement duties to existing staff workloads is not a sustainable solution,” she said in an email.

“Having stripped the civil service to the bone and having failed to prepare for the second wave [of COVID-19], this government is scrambling to bring in temporary support for enforcement on an urgent basis.”

Manitoba NDP Leader Wab Kinew said that he thinks more enforcement is needed, but that it should have been prioritized months ago, when the province first started seeing signs of increased community spread. 

While the rally in Steinbach on the weekend was upsetting to a lot of people, what is more upsetting is what’s happening in Manitoba’s hospitals, the Opposition leader said.

“What really upsets us even more than that is a potential crisis unfolding in our hospitals and in our personal care homes,” he said. 

Restrictions for big box stores being looked at

A new daily record was set on Sunday, when 494 more COVID-19 cases were announced. Another 392 cases were announced on Monday, and 270 more on Tuesday.

The total number of deaths in the province due to the pandemic is now 179. Of those, 110 deaths have come since the start of November.

On Monday, Pallister said the government was considering imposing tighter restrictions on big-box stores, suggesting they are flouting the spirit of the lockdown orders. 

Places like Walmart, Costco and Superstore have been allowed to remain open because they are deemed essential retailers, providing groceries and pharmacies.  

Long lines of customers have been seen waiting to get inside those stores, where they are able to purchase non-essential goods like toys, books and furniture. 

Some people have also complained that stores like Ikea and Best Buy have also remained open.

Smaller independent businesses that don’t carry a wide range of products have been forced to shutter during the lockdown.

Preventing big-box stores from selling products not considered essential is clearly “one element that has to be looked at,” Pallister said on Monday.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Ford

Posted on by

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, October 23, 2020

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Ford

Nineteenth century Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson is remembered mostly for his novels Treasure Island, featuring the pirate Long John Silver, and Kidnapped.   Almost as well-known as these, and probably far more influential in terms of the number of imitations it has inspired and adaptations that have been made, is a shorter work, published in 1886, the same year as Kidnapped, entitled Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1).  

The story is about a physician, Dr. Henry Jekyll, who like everybody else, struggles with the inner conflict between his base instincts and urges on the one hand and his ethical standards on the other.   Unlike everybody else, he, being a scientist, tries to find a scientific solution to the problem, which he sees more in terms of the need to protect his reputation than to suppress his vicious desires.   He invents a serum that transforms him into Mr. Edward Hyde so that he can indulge the latter without damaging his reputation.   The potion, however, also produces a division in his moral character, basically separating all the wickedness into the persona of Mr. Hyde and all of the goodness into the persona of Dr. Jekyll.   The consequence of all of this, is that Mr. Hyde is left with no inner constraints on his wickedness, and becomes a thoroughly depraved, sadistic, sociopathic, murderer.   Dr. Jekyll, who by contrast becomes more upright, humane and saintly, eventually loses control over the transformation process and starts to transform into Mr. Hyde involuntarily, at first in his sleep, later when he is awake.   Then, running out of the serum that reverses the transformation, and being unable to produce another batch that will work, he realizes that he is about to become his evil alter-ego permanently, and commits suicide.

After the story was published and became widely known, the names of the character became more or less synonymous with the kind of dual personality in which a person can be sweet, gentile, and charming one minute and the exact opposite of that the next.

I have been reminded of this story every time that Doug Ford, the current premier of Upper Canada, or Ontario as those who like to keep up with the times prefer to call it, has appeared in the news in the last eight months and especially the last two.

Two summers ago, when the Progressive Conservatives led by Doug Ford, won a majority of 76 out of the 124 seats in the provincial legislature, I breathed a sigh of relief for our neighbours to the east.   They had suffered under Grit misrule for fifteen years, first under Dalton McGuinty and then under Kathleen Wynne, who were in my opinion the two worst provincial-level Liberal leaders in the entire history of the Dominion.   The election that put Doug Ford in the premier’s chair, also reduced the Grits to seven seats, the worst defeat they have ever suffered in that province, which was itself even greater cause to rejoice than the Conservative victory.

When Doug Ford became leader of Upper Canada’s Progressive Conservatives in the lead-up to the provincial election of 2018, I knew little about him other than that he was the brother of the late Rob Ford, who from 2010 to 2014 had been mayor of the city which had been known as York before political correctness prompted its being rechristened with the Indian name of Toronto in 1834.  During the years in which Rob Ford was mayor, he was constantly under attack by the CBC and the rest of the mainstream progressive media, which only strengthened me in my conviction that, as I said at the time, Rob Ford, drunk and on crack, ran his city better than any other sober mayor in Canada, including and especially our own here in Winnipeg.   That would have been Sam Katz back then, and Mayor Duckie (2) who has since replaced him is even worse.    

The same corrupt left-wing media that had relentlessly pursued the destruction of his brother, went after Doug Ford during the 2018 election.   They shamelessly dug poor old Rob up from his grave – he had passed away from cancer two years previously – and began whipping and crucifying his corpse.   Since Ford was using populist rhetoric in his campaign, they naturally compared him to Donald the Orange who through populism and nationalism had become president of the American republic in 2016.    Now, just to be clear, since my politics happens to be the royal-monarch-as-defender-of-the-Church kind of Toryism from which the Conservative Party has been lamentably drifting for decades – or rather centuries – populism and nationalism are actually lower in my own estimation than they are in that of the progressive media.   Forced to choose between the former and the latter, however, I would gladly chose the populists any day.   So it was that this progressive assault on “Ontario’s Trump” raised his stock considerably in my books.

Despite the media’s amusing attempt to use his populist rhetoric to hang the “far right” label on him – neither populism nor what the media considers to be “far right” is right wing at all, let alone extremely right wing –  Doug Ford was basically a mainstream, centre-right, Progressive Conservative.   His platform consisted mostly of tax reductions, infrastructure improvement, de-regulation, and cleaning up the mess that McGuinty and Wynne had made of the province’s school system.   While there was much that was lacking in this platform, it was a major improvement over what the former governing party had been offering.   After Ford won the election, the first year and a half of his premiership were fairly impressive.   He stuck it to the provincial bureaucrats with a salary-and-hiring freeze, and went to war with the environazis who were determined to make life more miserable and unaffordable for everybody because of their superstitious belief in a climate apocalypse extrapolated through a computer simulation from the pseudoscientific theory of anthropogenic global warming.   This included standing up to Captain Airhead, whom we are unfortunate enough to have as the Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa, and who was threatening to impose a federal carbon tax on all provinces that did not voluntarily adopt one of their own.   Shortly after the election, the new Minister of Education announced that the province would repeal everything the outgoing government had done to turn the schools into indoctrination camps for brainwashing young children with sexual perversion and gender identity politics although there have been reports that the follow-through on this was less than spectacular and that all they really did was make a few minor adjustments.   (3)

The qualifying remarks in my last sentence aside, Ford had gotten off to a fairly good start for a contemporary, mainstream, Progressive Conservative premier.

Then the Chinese bat flu arrived in Upper Canada.    When that happened, Doug Ford underwent an almost-overnight metamorphosis into a despotic, bullying, COVID-monster, and became the darling of the media that had been demonizing him for the last two years.

Of course, something similar could be said about every premier in the Dominion.   Our own Progressive Conservative Premier here in the south-east corner of Prince Rupert’s Land, Brian Pallister, declared a state of emergency and put our province into a most draconian lockdown before there was any significant outbreak, gave that – in my opinion – power mad goon Dr. Brent Roussin a blank cheque for imposing restrictions, no matter how stupid, self-contradictory, and outright harmful they were, and only the other day doubled the fines for people who violate these arbitrary regulations.   Pallister, however, has long been known to be a jerk.   The only reason I welcomed his re-election the other year is that the other option was the truly odious Wab Kinew.   Doug Ford, on the other hand, had given us every reason to expect much better of him, before he turned around and started acting like a squirt bottle used for cleaning the orifices of the nether regions of the body.

Now, some might come to Doug Ford’s defence by saying that his province was hit particularly hard by the bat flu.   Granted, out of all the provinces its number of deaths was exceeded only by those of Lower Canada.   This hardly constitutes justification of his actions, however.   It is only to be expected that in a country-wide outbreak, the two provinces of Central Canada would have the most deaths.   They have the most people, after all.   There is more to it, however, than just that.   The bulk of the deaths in those provinces took place in long-term care facilities, which, again, is predictable from the fact that the only people who are at any sort of  statistically significant risk from the  Chinese bat flu are those who are really old, with two or more complicating health conditions.   In Upper and Lower Canada, the situation in the nursing homes got so bad that the Armed Forces had to be sent in to take the place of the staff who had either contracted the virus themselves or deserted in fear of doing so.    They sent back to their superiors reports of the horrendous conditions they found there – conditions such as cockroaches, rotting food, bedding left soiled for days on end, and worse – caused not by the bat flu but by neglect and abuse on the part of the administration and staff.   While Ford is hardly to blame for such conditions, for in many of these places this sort of thing had been going on for years prior to his premiership, the fact of the matter is that had he done the common sense thing at the beginning of the “pandemic” and taken measures to provide extra protection for the people most at risk, rather than listening uncritically to the imbecilic advice of medical experts who, themselves regurgitating nonsense cooked up by the World Health Organization to serve the nefarious ends of the Chinese Communists and the pharmaceutical conglomerates, recommended a universal quarantine on the young and healthy instead, this sort of thing could have been dealt with much earlier, and steps could have been taken which might have prevented the outbreaks in the nursing homes from getting so bad.  Jumping on board the lockdown bandwagon, prevented him from pursuing other, sounder, options, and made the situation even worse.

When the World Health Organization screamed “pandemic”, Ford traded in his tired old populism and common sense for a shiny new superstitious belief in the infallibility of international health organizations and other medical experts, and imposed their recommendations with a particularly heavy hand.   When people with legitimate concerns about the erosion of their rights, freedoms, livelihoods and businesses under public health orders and who likely largely overlapped the people who had voted Ford into the premier’s office two years ago, began to protest against social distancing, lockdowns, and the like, he dismissed them all as yahoos.   In July, he rammed Bill 195 through the legislature, a bill which gave him two years’ worth of emergency powers which he could exercise without consulting the legislature.    This was a province-level equivalent of what Captain Airhead and his Liberals had tried to sneak into an emergency spending bill in Parliament in March, but which Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition had mercifully thwarted.   Ford punished the members of his own party who voted against this bill, such as Belinda Karahalios, the MPP representing Cambridge, by expelling them from the caucus.

On Monday, September 28th, Ford held a press conference in which he announced that his province was officially in the “second wave” of the bat flu, and that it “will be worse than the first wave we faced earlier this year.”    As with all the other claptrap about this so-called “second wave” this was a cunning form of sleight-of-hand.   That day, Upper Canada had seen the highest number of new cases recorded in a single day since the beginning of the pandemic.  It had not seen a commensurate spike in the number of people gravely sick, being hospitalized, put in intensive care, and dying.   Indeed, the new cases were mostly among age groups which were not at any significant risk from the disease.   This has been more or less the case everywhere throughout this so-called “second wave”.   My province, which seen the number of deaths multiply since the beginning of September – we were at fourteen at the beginning of September and are now at forty-seven, is not an exception.   These deaths are, like those which more populated provinces experienced in the spring, almost entirely among those who are both extremely old and extremely sick, because this is Manitoba’s first wave, the entire misguided and totalitarian “flatten the curve” strategy having merely delayed it, while causing a whole lot of unnecessary other harm in the process.  

Even before Ford made this announcement, he had lowered the number of people allowed to meet socially in Toronto, Peel Region, and Ottawa to ten, slapped a $10 000 fine on anyone who organized an event that broke this rule, and a $750 fine on anyone who attended.   It is difficult to decide which is more ridiculous, the limit of social gatherings to ten in a country where assembly and association are two of the officially recognized fundamental freedoms, or the insanely high amounts of those fines.  (4)  Certainly, the late Rob Ford, who was well known for his love of large social gatherings, must be spinning in his grave over all this party-pooping, and the whole general way in which his brother has turned into a piece of rotting Communist excrement.

My unsolicited advice to Ford is to find the serum that will turn him back to his original self and to do so quickly.   Nobody, except the media progressives, who want everybody to spend the rest of their lives, hiding under their beds in their basements, curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs, afraid to go out lest the SARS-Cov-2 Bogeyman get them, likes this new version.

(1)   Stevenson deliberately left out both the definite article and the periods after the abbreviations for doctor and mister from his title.   His original publisher followed his whims.   Most subsequent publishers have not.  

(2) Brian Bowman looks like Jon Cryer, who, prior to his role as Alan on Three and a Half Men, was best known as “Duckie” in John Hughes’ 1986 “Brat Pack” teen rom-com, Pretty in Pink.   An interesting bit of trivia, although as completely irrelevant as this entire footnote, is that Charlie Sheen, Cryer’s co-star in Three and a Half Men (and earlier in Hotshots), was the original choice for the role of Blane, “Duckie”’s ultimately successful rival for the affections of Andie (Molly Ringwald) in this film, a role that ended up going to Andrew McCarthy.

(3)   See this article from The Interim.  It is worth noting that a serious effort to clean up the schools would have to involve more than just repealing Kathleen Wynne’s curriculum.   I was in Toronto for a wedding almost ten years ago, while Dalton McGuinty was still premier.   On the ride back to Pearson International, my driver, a recent immigrant from somewhere in the Middle East, struck up a conversation.   When he found out I was from Manitoba, he told me how lucky I was to be living in a rural, conservative, province, where I did not have to put up with the likes of Dalton McGuinty, who was making the schools teach sexual perversions to young children.   I didn’t have the heart to break the news to him, that the NDP which was governing Manitoba at the time was just about as bad, although they had not taken the schools quite that far.   My point, however, is that this conversation could not have taken place when it did, had McGuinty not already started the schools along the path down which Wynne would take them much further.

(4)  Of course there are those who have gone even further than Ford in this absurdity.    Dr. Brent Roussin has limited social gatherings to five in Winnipeg and the surrounding region.  Back in Ford’s own province, Patrick Brown, his predecessor as PC leader and currently the mayor of Brampton, imposed fines of up to $100 000 on those not practicing “physical distancing” as far back as April.   An orchard owner in neighbouring Caledon was threatened with a fine that large by the Ontario Provincial Police in late September for letting people pick their own apples on his farm.

How Captain Airhead Makes Andrew Scheer Look Much Better Than He Really Is

Posted on by
The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, June 13, 2019

How Captain Airhead Makes Andrew Scheer Look Much Better Than He Really Is

The Conservative Party of Canada really ought to be paying Captain Airhead a salary. He is the best publicity man they have. He has been doing a much better job of promoting their cause in the upcoming Dominion election than their own lackluster leadership. I do not mean merely that he makes them look good by being such a lousy, awful, and indeed, downright, horrible, alternative, although that is certainly the case. What I mean is that if there were a speck of truth to be found in any of his recent, scare-mongering, accusations against the Conservatives, the party would certainly rise in my esteem as it would that of any sensible and sane person. Evelyn Waugh once said that the problem with the Conservative Party was that it “has not turned the clock back a single second” and the Canadian incarnation of the party has given no indication that it plans to do so any time in the near future. Yet Justin Trudeau would have us believe that the Conservatives, if elected, would set the clock back by about a hundred years. My response to which is to say that if this happens, it would be a good start, but we need to go much further than that.

To say this, of course, is to commit the unpardonable sin of the Modern Age, blasphemy against the spirit of progress. It is a sin to which I gladly, and unrepentantly, plead guilty. Readers of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia might recall how in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Governor Gumpas of the Lone Islands, upon being told by King Caspian that the slave trade “must be stopped”, protests “But that would be putting the clock back”, adding “Have you no idea of progress, of development?” to which Caspian replies “I have seen then both in an egg…We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia.” Needless to say, I subscribe to Caspian’s – and Lewis’ – view of progress. This is the view of genuine British and Canadian Toryism – that progress does not happen, and if it does it is a bad thing and we need to put a stop to it. Sadly, the Canadian Conservative Party of our day, like the British Conservative Party of Waugh’s day, have abandoned the more authentic views of their tradition for something closer to American republicanism, which worships at the altar of the same idol of progress as liberalism and the Left. Justin Trudeau is deluded if he seriously thinks otherwise.

I am not going to dwell at any length on Trudeau’s accusations that Andrew Scheer is in bed with “racists”, “white supremacists” and “white nationalists” as I have already dealt with this in another essay. It shows how extremely unhealthy, the political climate has become in present day Canada, that these labels can be attached to people who do not so describe themselves and who neither subscribe to a racialist ideology like National Socialism nor have engaged in violent rhetoric or action either as individuals or organized groups towards other races. All that one needs to do is to oppose a particular kind of racism – the anti-white racism manifested in the immigration policy of making the country as diverse as possible as fast as possible and hence as least white as possible as fast as possible, in the progressive notion that all whites and only whites are racists, and in the cartoonish re-writing of history into a bad melodrama in which whites are assigned the role of the moustache-twirling, villain in the top hat and large black coat and everyone else plays the helpless maiden whom he has tied to the railroad track. Heck, one does not even have to actively oppose this anti-white racism himself – it is sufficient to be seen in the same room as someone who does. My respect for Mr. Scheer and the Conservative Party would skyrocket if they actually did take a bold, consistent, and principled stand against this pervasive form of progressive anti-white racism, but I am not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. The accusations against them are entirely of the “you were seen with so-and-so, who said such-and-such” variety. Indeed, the disgusting manner in which Scheer threw Michael Cooper under the bus, the fact that he seems to have enforced silence upon his party about the Grits’ disturbing plans to bring back the vile Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and the way in which Warren Kinsella, of all people, has been defending Scheer against Trudeau’s charges using arguments amusingly similar to those that I would have used to ridicule Kinsella’s book Web of Hate twenty years ago, all point inevitably to the conclusion that Scheer, like Harper before him, is on the same side as Trudeau on these issues, leaving the many Canadians who wish for the freedom to think differently from Kinsella, Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, Harry Abrams, Helmut-Harry Loewen and others of that ilk, without anyone in Parliament to speak for them.

What I am more interested in addressing here are Captain Airhead’s accusations of what he considers to be sexism. Back when Stephen Harper was Conservative leader the Liberals were constantly accusing him of having a “hidden agenda,” i.e., to re-criminalize abortion. Trudeau, who has constructed a political image of himself as a “male feminist” which has taken a severe beating over the last couple of years for reasons that I will not get into here, and who as part of that image takes a rather clownish, over-the-top, hard-line, “it’s a woman’s right” stance on abortion, has revived the old “hidden agenda” line for use against Scheer. He has been able to use recent events south of the border, where several states have passed strong anti-abortion legislation now that there is a perceived right-wing majority on the Supreme Court in the hopes of provoking a legal battle that will end in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to help him stoke the fears of his feminist support base.

Again, if there were the slightest amount of truth to Trudeau’s accusations, the Conservative Party’s stock would certainly rise in my books. I remember very well, however, that while Stephen Harper allowed pro-life people to run for his party at a time even as the other major party leaders began telling them they were persona non grata, this was the extent of his “support” for the pro-life cause. Pro-life people were allowed to run as Conservatives but woe unto them if they actually tried to do something to end abortion. There is not the slightest amount of evidence that things are any different now. This is extremely unfortunate for Canada because the current status quo on abortion, of which Trudeau is so proud, is an ever growing bloodstain on our country that cries out to heaven for divine justice, and there are no realistic options for changing that status quo, that do not require action by the Conservatives in the Dominion parliament. Even if it could be accomplished at the provincial level, which it cannot, the provincial Conservatives seem to have no more inclination to do so than their federal counterparts. The right-populist premier of Upper Canada assured the media last month, after progressives threw a tantrum when one of his MPPs pledged at a pro-life rally “to make abortion unthinkable in our lifetime” that his government “will not re-open the abortion debate.” Even more recently the provincial Conservative government here in Manitoba has announced that an abortion pill will now be fully covered by the public. There are many health care products and services which are necessary to help people who are suffering from excruciating pain or are in danger of going blind which are not fully covered by the public, but a pill that murders babies soon will be.

It is difficult to think of anything that puts the lie to the entire left-liberal concept of progress more than this matter of abortion. The progressive position is that a pregnant woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy. Canadian progressives, including the leadership of the Liberal Party, take the most extreme degree of this position, which allows for no qualifications such as “up to this-or-that stage of development”, insists that this “right” be protected against even interference of the persuasive variety, requires that the public pay for it, insists that the debate is closed and that the other side should be made to shut up, and boasts that their victory shows how advanced we have become in our thinking. Their entire position, however, is based upon a lie. The position that a woman has or ought to have the right to terminate her pregnancy could scarcely be formulated, much less justified, apart from the notion that the pregnancy is something that concerns her, her body, and her health alone. “Pro-choice” lingo such as “the procedure”, “reproductive rights”, “control of her own body” is all carefully selected to create this impression. Yet, obviously, pregnancy is not simply a matter of a woman, her health, and her body. It also concerns her baby, whose very life is at stake in the pregnancy. An abortion is not merely a medical procedure undergone for the health of the pregnant woman. It is the termination of the life of a baby.

Far from being an advanced state of ethical thinking the so-called “pro-choice” position of the progressive left is a regression into the darkest form of paganism. In the times of ancient paganism, infanticide was not an uncommon way of keeping the family within the means of its resources. The story of Oedipus is but one of the ancient legends that address the cruelty of the practice of exposure by telling of a child rescued from this fate by a kindly couple. Worse, the worship of several pagan idols required the sacrifice of children, usually the first-born. Several of the most important ethicists of ancient Greece and Rome condemned this practice in Carthage, the city-state in what is now Tunisia in northern Africa which was Rome’s rival for control of the Mediterranean world in the third and fourth centuries BC. The Carthaginians would sacrifice their children to an idol, whom the Greek and Roman commentators identified with Kronos or Saturn from their own mythologies, by placing them in the heated arms of a huge bronze statue. This is a practice they inherited from Tyre, the Phoenician city-state in what is now Lebanon, of which Carthage was originally a colony. The Phoenicians shared this practice with their southern neighbours, the tribes of Canaan, and this practice is clearly identified in the Old Testament as one of the worst forms of the wickedness that brought divine judgement upon the Canaanites in the form of Israel being sent to conquer and drive them out of the Promised Land. Later, when the Israelites apostatized into the idolatry of their neighbours, this practice is again pointed to by the Prophets as having particularly defiled their land and led ultimately to the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. A curse was pronounced upon the place outside Jerusalem where these sacrifices took place and by the time of the New Testament it was regarded as a defiled place, fit only for burning refuse and the bodies of criminals, and lent its name to the fate of those to be condemned at the Final Judgement.

Even before the Exodus, and the giving of the Mosaic Law which strictly forbade the Israelites from participating in the abominations of Canaan, such as child sacrifice, and required that they redeem their firstborn with animal sacrifices instead, the Book of Genesis draws a contrast between the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the false gods of the pagans. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, but prevents him from actually going through with the sacrifice, for it is faith and not his son, that God wanted from Abraham. Abraham, when asked by Isaac where the lamb for the sacrifice is, makes the prophecy that God Himself will provide a lamb, a prophecy that we see fulfilled in the New Testament when John the Baptist, speaking of Jesus, says “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” The pagan idols, who are really devils, require their worshippers to sacrifice their children, the true and living God, gave His only-begotten Son as the sacrificial Lamb Who would take away the sin of the world.

As the Christian religion grew and spread throughout the ancient world, its influence led, among other things, to the Roman Empire’s finally banning infanticide. If anything actually deserves to be described as an enlightened ethical step forward in the right direction this was it. By using this language to describe the revival of pagan baby murder, the Left demonstrates just how much its concept of “progress” really is King Caspian’s “going bad” after all. It also reveals itself to be just another form of ancient, pagan, devil worship.

The question for Andrew Scheer and the Conservative Party is, what God do you serve? Scheer, who was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, claims to be a Christian but this is also the case with Justin Trudeau. As long as Scheer, like his predecessor Harper, prevents the members of his party from actively combating the evil of baby murder and instead requires them to join in the loony Left’s crusade against its chimerical bugbear of “white racism”, it is not the true and living God that he is serving.

Fortunately for him, he has Justin Trudeau to make him look so much better than he really is. How much better for us, it would be, however, if instead of relying on this, he were to come out and take a bold stand on the things for which the Conservative Party ought to be standing. He could start by promising the turn the clock back a century and a half, to right after Confederation before the Liberal Party got their grubby hands on the country and things started to go downhill.

Posted by at 4:56 AM

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,