“In recent years, loyalty has become a suspicious word in Canadian public life. To express attachment to one’s culture, values, or historical narrative is increasingly treated as a moral flaw.”
Source: Rawpixel
Author: Dotan Rousso
In recent years, loyalty has become a suspicious word in Canadian public life. To express attachment to one’s culture, values, or historical narrative is increasingly treated as a moral flaw rather than a virtue. We are often told that strong identification with a group signals exclusion or prejudice, as if rootedness itself were a barrier to be overcome. This view is mistaken. It misunderstands something fundamental about what it means to be human.
From an evolutionary perspective, loyalty was never optional. For most of human history, survival depended on belonging to a group and remaining faithful to it. Shared norms, mutual obligation, and collective memory were not abstract ideals; they were the conditions of survival. Group loyalty was not a moral excess; it was the mechanism through which individuals lived. That reality did not disappear with the advent of modern liberal democracies. Identity does not emerge in a vacuum. Language, moral instincts, and traditions are inherited before they are chosen. Acknowledging this does not undermine pluralism; it explains how a stable society becomes possible in the first place.
Yet in times of moral confusion, this basic truth is inverted. Under the banner of progressiveness, Canadians are encouraged to treat strong cultural attachment as morally suspect. Commitment is confused with intolerance, and loyalty is portrayed as a refusal to accept others. This framing is false, and its impact is not merely academic. We see it in the hushed debates over municipal holiday displays and the quiet removal of historical figures from the public square. When we scrub the “particular” to make room for the “universal,” we aren’t creating a more inclusive space; we are creating an empty one. We are asking Canadians to stand on a foundation of air.
Consider the irony of Remembrance Day. On this day, Canadians are encouraged to honor sacrifice, continuity, and national memory as unifying virtues. These rituals are widely understood as dignified. Yet, when similar language of loyalty appears outside officially sanctioned contexts, it is often treated with suspicion. The same society that honors collective memory in one setting condemns it in another. This inconsistency reveals not openness, but a deep confusion about the moral legitimacy of belonging itself.
It is entirely possible to respect others and recognize their legitimacy while remaining deeply committed to one’s own identity. Valuing what is “ours” does not require denying value to “theirs.” These positions are not contradictory; they coexist naturally in any healthy society. A culture that demands people abandon their deepest sources of meaning in the name of openness does not produce moral clarity. It produces fragility and resentment.
Loyalty, properly understood, is a moral commitment. It means holding certain values and traditions as worthy of protection. If a group’s identity is challenged by ideologies that seek to erase or delegitimize it, there is nothing un-Canadian about naming that threat and resisting it. Refusing to do so is not tolerance; it is abdication. To stand firm in one’s identity without apology is an act of responsibility. It means protecting what gives life coherence without pretending that all values are interchangeable.
As many Canadians mark Christmas, this is a moment to reconsider loyalty not as exclusion, but as rootedness. In an age that treats belonging as a liability, we must remember that it remains a foundation of human dignity and the bedrock of a confident, pluralistic Canada.
An Open Letter to Dr. Bonnie Henry By Arthur Topham CaribooSentinel.ca
“To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” ~ Jesus the Christ (John 18:37.)
To: Dr. Bonnie Henry,
British Columbia Provincial Health Officer,
Ministry of Health,
1515 Blanshard Street,
Victoria, BC V8W 3C9
Dear Dr. Bonnie Henry,
Seasons Greetings to you from the Cariboo.
The great 18th century British writer and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, considered by many to be the Godfather of the United States of America, played a crucial roll in the struggle of the Colonists to break free of the yoke of King George III throughout the American Revolution that commenced in 1776. When the Colonial army under General George Washington was in retreat from General Howe’s British forces and their supplies and ammunition running low the moral of the volunteers was also at an all time decline. It was then that Thomas Paine, who fought along side the Continental militia, penned his now famous series of pamphlets known as the Crisis Papers.
In late September as he sat absorbed by an army campfire on a hogshead scratching out on paper Crisis I, his first of many pamphlets he didn’t realize that someone had walked up beside him. Pausing for a moment he felt a hand on his shoulder and looking up he saw General Washington. While discussed the current situation that the Colonials were in Washington asked Paine if he might take a look at what he was writing. Tilting the sheets of paper toward the firelight he silently read to himself the following words:
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot, will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
The General complimented Thomas Paine on his writing and asked him to send him copies of it when he was able to have it published. Paine of course replied that it would be his first priority. When the General returned to his tent and the night fell silent Paine continued with his work and the word flowed forth:
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM, should not be highly rated.
I chose to begin my letter to you with the words of Mr. Paine because they best convey, for myself and likely many others here in British Columbia and across our beleaguered nation, the sentiments now felt as we near the completion of the second year of the present Covid-19 crisis and the greatest of all Holy Days of the year – Christmas – draws nigh.
As a longstanding journalist working in the alternative news media and currently the publisher and editor of The Cariboo Sentinel (CaribooSentinel.ca) this manufactured ‘pandemic’ has become the mainstay of practically all msm and alternative news items since it first came to public light in January of 2020 and been both a boon and a blight for journalists, critics and proponents around the world, albeit at a cost yet to be fully ascertained.
In response to what, in the alternative view is best defined as a “plandemic” rather than a naturally occurred pandemic, I have written Open Letters to you before regarding the Covid-19 issue and sent them off knowing full well that the likelihood of receiving a reply back would be as assured as the proverbial snowball’s chance of survival in hell. Still, as Thomas Paine so aptly put it, the tyranny that has now come to my country and my province since Christmas of 2019 won’t easily be conquered and being by nature neither a “summer soldier” or a “sunshine patriot” I would be shirking my duty to God and to Canada were I to cease in my determined quest to inform your office and the provincial NDP government you represent, of the mendacious machinations and the unspeakable pain, destruction, death and anguish that your masks, mandates, lockdowns and specious inoculations have bequeathed to the people of this once beautiful, God-fearing province.
I know you are not alone in your quest to satisfy the urgings of those who, for the most ghastly of reasons, are adamant in their determination to murder millions, if not billions, of innocent souls in a sinister effort to pull off a final global coup d’etat and sink their greedy, filthy claws into the body of the world’s people in order to put a final end to our freedom as sovereign human beings created in the image of the Heavenly Father.
Never in the history of this glorious planet has there ever been a time where so many former independent nations have suddenly, as if by some sinister, magical spell, acted in such a unified manner in order to destroy their own sovereignty. It’s tantamount in some ways to the concept of global suicide, to a worldwide Jonestown event wherein the fevered brains and minds of the masses suddenly succumb to the will of a master sorcerer and lose all semblance of independent thought, reason and logic.
What it is that makes the rest of those in the provincial government and the mainstream media and, most tragic of all, the majority of the medical profession, willingly collaborate with you in order to lend a feigned sense of credence to your overt, duplicitous actions, especially given the reality of the effects they’re having upon the people of BC, still remains a mystery to the mass of t.v. watchers and newspaper readers who, thus far, have willingly ingested all the fake news reports, the fake statistics, the fake ‘viruses’ that instantly disappeared the historic common yearly flu, the fake untested, poisoned bioweapon euphemistically labelled a “vaccine” and the fake accusations being spread about concerning the dangers posed by those who, for various reasons, have not fallen into the jibberjabber trap you and Premier Horgan and Health Minister Dix have set for the people of BC. Their faith in you and in the NDP’s Machiavellian measures is a subject that future historians will undoubtedly debate over for a long time.
What the instigators of this fake global crisis have precipitated, knowingly or not, is a worldwide REVOLUTION; one that, were it compared with the writings of the major Communist authors of the past clearly delineates what their primary aim for the world at large has been since the Bolshevik take over of the Russian republic in 1917 wherein the Christian Tsar Nicholas II and the whole of his family (including the dog) were massacred and an atheistic, nihilist regime of brutal totalitarianism then reigned, ironically in a sense right up until Christmas day, December 25, 1991 when the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time marking 74 years of repression and lost freedom wherein approximately 66 million Christian Russians were genocided in various brutal ways.
And so Dr. Henry the similarities that surround you and the NDP government of the province of BC and the aforementioned Soviet communist example lead me up to your latest attack upon Christmas when we Christians traditionally celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. To further document all the attacks upon the Christian faith in Canada over the last two years would stretch this letter to the point of being onerous and I shall forego doing so but suffice it to say that the world is fully aware of these diabolic actions precipitated by those who serve another master.
I just want to close by saying that in this world of wonders there are many realms aside from the physical and political and financial. There are also spiritual and moral realms that we human beings are a quintessential part of which motivate and energize and inspire those of faith. It has always been one of the primary aims of the master Deceiver to destroy those who would willingly acknowledge and obey the supreme power and force of the Heavenly Father/Creator of this world and by your own actions and the actions of the atheist NDP leadership of the province of BC you have proven yourself to be a willing agent of the anti-Christ.
History will regard you as such but there is always the opportunity for everyone to cease and desist and this applies to you as well when it comes to your decision to attempt sabotaging the one religious celebration that Canadians have held dear to their hearts since the inception of this nation. I would ask that you stop trying to kill Christmas and instead start celebrating the rebirth of the peace and love and veneration of the Heavenly Father and His glorious Son that you so obviously are missing and so urgently in need of.
God grant you the courage to break free of your bonds and start serving Him rather than the Adversary.
