Jamie Sarkonak: Jon Kay’s legal victory exposes Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s anti-conservative agenda

Jamie Sarkonak: Jon Kay’s legal victory exposes Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s anti-conservative agenda

(National Post, November 24, 2022)

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This is a politically motivated group that has no qualms about accusing mainstream conservatives of being racist and using the legal system to try to silence them.

A recent decision by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has given Canadians yet another reason to question the federal government’s relationship with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN),

On Nov. 10, the court dismissed a defamation lawsuit launched by lawyer Richard Warman, also a board member of CAHN. Warman sued journalists Jonathan and Barbara Kay for tweets that criticized CAHN’s links to the Antifa movement in the United States, which has been covered by C2C Journal and The Federalist (the Kays did not name Warman himself in their tweets). In the end, the judge ruled that the tweets weren’t defamatory, which meant the Kays wouldn’t be liable.

Even if the tweets did meet the legal threshold to be considered defamatory, the Kays would have been saved by the legal defences available. The judge said that the statements made had the benefit of being true, noting that, “CAHN did in fact assist Antifa and that the movement has been violent,” and it would be reasonable to state that it is not a “good look” for a human rights organization to support a violent movement.

Additionally, the judge concluded the defence of fair comment could apply, meaning the opinions expressed by the Kays could be reasonably drawn from the known facts and were not expressed out of malice. The judge noted that even “Warman’s evidence was that he and CAHN were part of the Antifa movement,” and its “muscular resistance” and “physical disruption” were known to two other board members.

The decision tells us two things: that there are members of CAHN who are willing to use the legal system to silence its critics, and that there is a relationship between CAHN and the Antifa movement. It’s yet another indicator that the Government of Canada — particularly the Department of Canadian Heritage — should distance itself from the organization.

CAHN has received government funding in the past, including a grant of $268,400 to participate in an “anti-racism action program” from October 2020 to March 2022. The grant agreement, obtained through an access to information request, shows that the money was used to hire additional staff members, facilitate workshops, write articles about hate groups (CAHN covers everyone from far-right neo-nazis to conservative-leaning school board candidates)  and engage on social media.

A “recommendation for ministerial approval” form (also obtained through an access to information request), which is used by bureaucrats to review the grant application prior to its approval, described the expected outcomes:  “This project will increase the organization’s capacity to counter online hate by hiring four team members to carry out the monitoring of extreme-right groups, report on their activities and file complaints with law enforcement; it will educate the public as to these groups and the damage they create, and will share information through 10,000 Facebook and Twitter followers.”

Reporting citizens to police wasn’t an expectation written into the final grant agreement, but it’s concerning that paying a third-party group to investigate people for the purpose of initiating criminal investigations was on the table in the first place.

On top of that, CAHN has advised the government on numerous occasions. Records from an access to information request show that it was listed as a Canadian Heritage stakeholder on the Public Health Agency of Canada’s vaccine roll-out round-table. That was in January 2021, a month after CAHN signed its contract with the federal government.

In March 2022 — the month the government grant was set to expire — Canadian Heritage created an advisory group to help it craft its online censorship legislation. Among the appointees was Bernie Farber, chair of the CAHN. (Months before he was named to the panel, Farber told the CBC that when it comes to internet regulation, “I would rather have poorly worded legislation than nothing at all.”) The panellists could be paid a maximum of $27,000 for their work.

The panel made a number of recommendations for an online censorship regime, one of which was public education: specifically, the implementation of “programs to improve media literacy and developing a concept of e-citizenship through outreach programs in schools and communities.”

The recommendations were released on June 15, 2022. A couple weeks later, the Government of Canada and CAHN launched an “anti-hate toolkit” for use in schools — a project that was supported by the Canadian Heritage grant. The toolkit’s focus was on far-right radicalization (it should be noted that far-left radicalization and Islamic radicalization, which have also been problems in Canada, were not mentioned in it).

Among other things, the toolkit outlined problematic behaviours in students that should be reported to teachers and corrected, including displaying the Red Ensign (Canada’s former flag), the use of various memes and supporting unsavoury politicians like former U.S. president Donald Trump.

The toolkit is very much a political document that primarily targets the far-right. But in doing so, it goes after mild traditionalism, classical liberal stances on social policy and mainstream conservative values, as well.

Despite the fact the organization was only just incorporated in 2018, members of CAHN have appeared before parliamentary committees multiple times since 2019, often to discuss social policy and public safety. Its members also often appear in the media as independent “experts” on the subject hate.

This is a politically motivated group that is now recognized by a court to be associated with Antifa, and has no qualms about accusing mainstream conservatives of being racist and using the legal system to try to silence them. It’s free to advocate for whatever it wants, but the federal government shouldn’t be using the group to push fundamentally illiberal views on the limits of free speech in a free and democratic society.

Government-funded school pamphlet warns against Conservative Party, free speech, Trump & Labels the Red Ensign “Hate”

Government-funded school pamphlet warns against Conservative Party, free speech, Trump & Labels the Red Ensign “Hate”

This report should be on front pages everywhere. The booklet, entitled Confronting and Preventing Hate in Canadian Schools, is said to be a tool against online hate, and is slated for government distribution all across Canada. It is a step toward turning publicly funded schools into Leftist indoctrination camps, with traditional values presented as “hate.” The booklet is a companion to the unprecedented Liberal Internet censorship bill which recently sparked a backlash.

Despite being presented as fighting “hate,” the new booklet instead fuels further hatred and division in Canada.

Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen was once Canada’s Immigration Minister; he sought to “massively ramp up” refugee intake, and that he did. He also sought to “lead the charge” on the UN’s global migration pact.

In addressing the “core values” that Hussen advocates teaching “our kids”: These are some highlights of the shocking 53-page propaganda booklet, created by the so-called “Anti-hate” network led by Bernie Farber, a member of the Trudeau government’s “expert” advisory group on online “safety.”

  • Freedom of expression is presented as a cover for “hate.”
  • Trump’s border wall to stop illegals is presented as “hate.”
  • Mainstream Conservative parties are singled out and presented as being “infiltrated” by bigots, “groypers,” and “white nationalists.” The inappropriate pamphlet actually states: “While the majority of Groypers are white, there are a growing number of youth of colour involved in the movement, as they engage in antisemitism, anti- feminism/misogyny, anti-2SLGBTQIA+, Islamophobia, and anti-Black racism.”
  • The book openly names people such as Lauren Southern and Faith Goldy.
  • It makes the claim: “In our work, some of the most extreme neo-Nazis have been teenage girls.”
  • It condemns a “specific Canadian flavour” of the “worldview”  that is “seen on many college campuses, often under the banner of “Canada First.” 
  • In a chapter on “hate promoting symbols,” the booklet names the Red Ensign flag as offensive, even though it was used as Canada’s national symbol until 1965.
  • Condemns concerns about terrorism and crime as “anti-immigrant.” 
  • References  Trump as a “problematic politician”and condemns his border wall as “racist.”
  • Warns and alerts about students who may inquire “why there aren’t any straight pride parades, or a white history month during class discussion.
  • Without context, anti-police sentiment is taught as the pamphlet teaches that “Black residents are 20 times more likely to be shot by Toronto police than white counterparts.”
  • The booklet ironically utilizes intersectional tropes and stereotypes “people of colour,” stating that “shared beliefs in misogyny, anti-2SLGBTQIA+, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness will often attract and unite people of colour to hate groups.”
  • It heavily promotes the Marxist, anti-nuclear family Black Lives Matter movement.

Parents need to take note of the violation of their children’s minds with Left/Marxist indoctrination. The material presented as “anti-hate” is the most divisive encroachment into the school system to date, singling out and stereotyping any thought that isn’t conducive to its radical agenda. The booklet is in step with Canada’s rapid descent into totalitarianism.

Government-funded school pamphlet calls Canada’s Red Ensign a “hate symbol”

Nationalists Celebrate Dominion Day With Paul Fromm

Nationalists Celebrate Dominion Day With Paul Fromm

The Red Ensign, the Flag of the Real Canada
Noon END THE LOCKDOWN Rally With People’s Party of Canada at Niagara Falls

Fantastic Dominion Day. I attended a noon NO MORE LOCKDOWN Rally in Niagara Falls. Later, a great group of nationalists met. Not a guilt-ridden soul in the lot. You could hear English, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Czech & Slovenian. My grilled burgers were pronounced delicious

We Iconoclasts as Barbarians Against the Globalist Order

We Iconoclasts as Barbarians Against the Globalist Order

I read the excellent essay “Stand up to the mob : Statue wreckers and their Establishment enablers..”  just now     *     URL below
attached find a photo  the Red Ensign on me … the flag our parents fought under. 
I make a point of wearing it at the GATHERINGS to    END the God Damned LOCKDOWN

20200913_132958.jpg

front page story on the Timely-Colonic  ( Victoria’s pathetic excuse for a newspaper )  on Saturday, was, about the statue of Queen Victoria on the precinct of the Legislature,  being vandalized.  Yesterday, we gathered on the grounds as part of our weekly  END the God damned LOCKDOWN protest, immediately beside that statue. I spoke with the Sgt. of the Leg. protective services. He told me they have photos of the perpetrators / names of 2 of them. The perps were members of the 200 + group which had occupied the grounds, the previous day, protesting  logging at Fairy Creek. No mere co-incidence that  a couple of assholes disgraced the whole crowd. A perfect example of what Gerry T Neal’s essay explains.   The Victoria police are investigating and preparing to lay charges of criminal mischief

I was tossed in to the anti-abortion thing, in 1991.  The Everywoman’s Court case had originated   in 1988. 104 and more anti-abortionists were charged for contempt of the Court Order then in place.  As I educated me-self on that topic via 4 court actions … I discovered that,  up til early 1988, the Pro-Lifers   had been peaceful and respectful. Deliberately making way for public travel on the public sidewalk outside the abortuary. Along came KENNETH LLOYD BRIDGES and another guy. From first-hand conversation with a few folks who’d been on the scene then,  I learned that Bridges / the other guy, had rolled in to town, un-known to any of the other genuine Pro-Lifers.  Bridges / the other guy, then stoked up the protesters to block the doors of the abortuary as was the fad in the US of A.  When about 104 of them got arrested, Bridges / his sidekick were long gone.  No doubt in my mind but that they were agents provocateur,  sent in to frame up the issue the way it was down south.

the peaceful protesters … nearly all Christians … were sabotaged/ betrayed as well as mis-led by their own naive leaders.    From that moment on, anti-abortionists were portrayed as the bad guys…. even “domestic terrorists”.  One of these days I will put out a book about my experience “About a Decade”.

Gordon Watson

CONSERVATISM AND NEO-CONSERVATISM

THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

The Canadian Red Ensign

MONDAY, MAY 2, 2016

Conservatism and Neo-conservatism

For at least the last forty years if you were to have asked a self-described conservative living in North America what conservatism was all about the answer you would have received would have been that it is about small government, low taxes, freedom, free markets, free trade, tough laws and sentences for violent crimes and a strong military. If the conservative you were talking to happened to remember he might have added the defence of the nuclear family and a traditional Christian morality and way of life.

In my country, Canada, conservatism was originally about much more than this. Canada is a country that was founded within the British Empire in the Victorian era and which developed her national sovereignty within the British family of nations without severing ties to the Crown and Britain, the way our republican neighbour to the south had, and as such inherited from the older country, the older kind of conservatism known as Toryism. Toryism was about monarchy, the institutional church, and government for the common good of a national society envisioned as an organic whole that includes past and future generations, not merely those present among us today. I have been a conservative of this older type, a Tory, my entire life.

There has been much talk in recent years of “neo-conservatism”. What is meant by this term is somewhat different in Canada and the United States, although in both countries it refers to either the espousing as conservative of ideas that were once considered liberal, the profession of conservatism by former liberals, or both.

In the United States, the term refers to a very specific group of people and a set of ideas with which they were associated. The original neoconservatives had been members of the group known as the “New York Intellectuals”, which consisted mainly of second generation, Jewish Americans who studied educated either at City College of New York, Columbia University, or both in the period between the World Wars and who in that same period espoused politics that ranged from New Deal liberalism to far-left Trotskyism. After the Second World War many of these became Cold War liberals, i.e., liberals who strongly supported the West in the fight against Soviet Communism, and of these many realigned with the right in the 1960s and 1970s, to become the “neo-conservatives”. The best known among these were Norman Podhoretz, who edited the journal Commentary for decades, his wife Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, also a journalist, and his wife, historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb. It was Kristol who famously defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality.” As “neoconservatives” these continued to look upon the New Deal welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, the early stages of second wave feminism, and other such causes they had espoused as liberals favourably, but it is their outlook on geopolitics that is their most notable distinctive.

The American neoconservatives believe that American style liberal democracy is the birthright of everyone on the planet and that the United States has a duty to guarantee that birthright, by offering military assistance and protection to countries that have liberal democracy, fighting against and toppling the enemies of liberal democracy, and bringing liberal democracy to countries that do not yet enjoy it. For this reason, the neoconservatives believe, the United States must continue to maintain a military presence throughout the world, as the world’s policeman. This vision of a Pax Americana is rooted in liberalism, having antecedents in the war aims of both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its most utopian articulation, that of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Manenvisions all of human history as having lead up to universal capitalism and democracy and is simply the latest manifestation of the Whig theory of history.

The American kind of neo-conservatism has come under much heavy criticism during the last thirteen years for its influential role, during the presidential administration of George W. Bush, in leading the United States into the disastrous War in Iraq. While most of this criticism is well-deserved, those making the criticism seldom understand the nature of the problem with the neoconservative view of geopolitics. Critics on the left, inevitably maintain that all the neoconservative talk about spreading democracy, protecting the rights of women, and such claptrap, is just a thin veil masking the lust to grab power and resources for the United States, or the large corporations that to people of this mindset are the real powers behind the American government, from which it is assumed on the left that the neoconservative enthusiasm for war arises. In reality, however, it is precisely because the neoconservatives are true believers, in Eric Hoffer’s meaning of that expression, in democracy, human rights, liberalism, and basically all the same ideals that their critics on the left hold dear, that they feel that it is imperative that these American liberal values be exported universally.

In Canada, the word neo-conservatism is often used interchangeably with conservatism, in reference to the conservatism described in the first paragraph. This intent of this usage is to contrast what has been called conservatism for the last forty years or so, with the older Toryism. Red Tories in particular like to use the word in this way. Red Tories are people who, like myself, are High Tories of the older royalist, institutional church, and common good-of-the-organic-whole variety, but who, unlike myself, have avowed sympathies with socialism, feminism, pacifism, and other left-of-centre causes for which I have nothing but disdain and contempt. The Red Tories are quite right in saying that much of what is called conservatism today is what was called liberalism a hundred years ago, but I cannot help but observe the irony of the fact that this offered as criticism by those whose Toryism is modified by an adjective that alludes to their espousal of ideals that have also sprung from the modern well of liberalism and much more recently than the capitalism of the neoconservatives. Liberalism is not like a fine wine that has improved with age – it is more like milk that has long passed its expiry date, and been left out in the sun.

At times these attempts to distinguish Canadian neo-conservatism from the older tradition can be exaggerated in a way that can be quite misleading and which distorts the nature of the older Toryism. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear Red Tories say that the older Toryism was the opposite of what is called conservatism today. Think about what that suggests regarding the first items mentioned in the description of conservatism in the first paragraph – small government, low taxes, free markets, and free trade. (1) There is a grain of truth in this when it comes to free trade – the older Toryism espoused protectionism – but if we were to accept the assertion that the older conservatism was the opposite of today’s conservatism, we would have to conclude that it was opposed to freedom and stood for big government, high taxes, and a centrally planned and bureaucratically administered economy. This, however, is laughable nonsense. Indeed, as I have frequently pointed out, the older “throne and altar” Toryism, ought to be regarded as being more favourable to small government and low taxes than contemporary North American conservatism. Toryism was born out of the defence of royal sovereign authority against those who wished to wrest it away from the Crown and to vest all power in elected legislative assemblies. The opponents of the original Tories declared themselves to be on the side of “liberty” against tyranny, but the history of the last four centuries tells us another story. What that history tells us is that the more the Crown’s authority was limited and the power of the elected assembly augmented, the larger and more intrusive government became, while taxes grew both exponentially and astronomically. (2)

With regards to freedom, the difference between the older Toryism and the classical liberalism that much of modern conservatism resembles was not that the latter supported freedom while the former opposed and feared it. It was rather a disagreement about the nature of freedom. The classical liberals equated liberty with the sovereignty of the individual, argued that the function of government was to protect liberty so defined, and declared that only democratic governments, in which each individual participates at least through his elected representative, can so protect the liberty that is individual sovereignty. By contrast, the Tory view of freedom, grounded in the thought of classical antiquity, was explained by the martyred King Charles I, in his final speech before his execution, when he declared that the liberty and freedom of the people consist in their having from their government “those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own” rather than “having share in government”.

Anyone who happens to think that the liberal doctrine is more conducive to personal freedom than that of the Tory it is invited to look around him today. The idea of freedom as individual sovereignty is now being taken to the nth degree, with even such constraints on that sovereignty as those of nature and reality itself no longer recognized as valid. Thus, for example, gender is now being declared to be something that the individual decides for himself – or herself – or itself – or whatever! By consequence, liberalism is now declaring such self-determination of gender to be a right of the individual, which is to say something that belongs to the essence of the individual’s sovereignty. Since in liberal theory, the rights of the individual are what law and government exist to protect, the consequence of this will inevitably be that the legislatures and courts, will impose legal restrictions on what we can think, say or do, in order to protect such a “right”. The more the individual is declared to be sovereign, the more new “rights” are discovered, the more laws restricting our thoughts, speech, and actions are passed, so that what is called “freedom” today, often resembles a soft form of totalitarian tyranny. (3)

Contemporary conservatism, or what is called in Canada neo-conservatism, ought not to be faulted by Tories of the older tradition merely for being in favour of small government, low taxes, and freedom. It merits criticism for defining conservatism by such things, rather than by monarchy, institutional religion, the common good of the organic whole, and by such things as continuity, tradition, and established order for which the older Toryism stood, and which, as Roger Scruton argued in The Meaning of Conservatism, provide the necessary context for any real freedom to exist and flourish in a civilized society. There was nothing wrong with Canadian neo-conservatism’s opposition to Canadians being taxed to death, overregulated, and treated as wards of a nanny state and it was for these things that this High Tory voted for and even took out membership in the neoconservative Reform Party in the 1990s. Where Canadian neo-conservatism did deserve censure was over the anti-patriotic contempt for Canada and wish that she was “more like the United States” that could far too often be found in its ranks, as well as the liberal equation of democracy with freedom and legitimate and accountable government evident in its wish to turn the Senate into an elected body which was such a marked contrast with the way the older Canadian Toryism defended our Westminster parliamentary monarchy, including the Senate, correctly perceiving that it and our traditional rights and freedoms, stood and fell together. (4) It was over these things that I walked away from the Canadian Alliance prior to the completion of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003.

(1) It is even less accurate to say that the older Toryism was the opposite of the other items mentioned in the first paragraph, although here too there are important distinctions to be drawn. The family that the older Toryism defended, for example, was not just the nuclear unit, but a larger, multigenerational, kinship group, headed by a patriarch. Also, the older Toryism tended to look to the organized Church for what “a traditional Christian morality and way of life” meant, while contemporary conservatism is more likely to be influenced by personal interpretations of the Scriptures.

(2) It was not uncommon in the last century for such High Tories as Anthony Burgess, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robertson Davies (as Samuel Marchbanks) to avow both a feudal, medieval royalism and an attitude of anarchistic contempt for the gargantuan, overregulating body that is the modern bureaucratic state in the same breathe, a sentiment which I heartily share.

(3) That liberalism was a doctrine that loudly proclaimed its faith in freedom while containing within itself the seeds of totalitarian tyranny was not something that was only evident after it had been brought to its apex in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the sixteenth century, the Puritan progenitors of the first liberals, the Whigs, denounced the “tyranny” of the House of Stuart and proclaimed themselves to be on the side of liberty, but when they had seized power for themselves, made it illegal to participate in sports, games, and other amusements on Sundays after church, closed inns, alehouses and theatres, and banned the celebration of Christmas and Easter. In the century prior to that, the first Puritans, in the name of defending Christian liberty against “popish tyranny”, demanded that all practices that were part of the pre-Reformation tradition but which could not be shown to be explicitly authorized in Scripture should be forbidden, while Richard Hooker, in his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, argued on the contrary, that Christians ought to be free to observe, whatever practices of the pre-Reformation tradition could not be shown to be explicitly condemned in Scriptures. Hooker’s thinking, which helped lay a foundation for both a distinctive Anglican theology and Toryism, to any rational person, allowed a greater amount of freedom than that of the Puritans which eventually gave birth to liberalism.

(4) See, for example, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown(Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972).

ALBERTA’S LEFT TURN

Alberta’s Left Turn

 
by Gerry T. Neal
I had not been following the recent provincial election campaign in Alberta. I found it interesting, therefore, when Kevin Michael Grace over at The Ambler predicted an NDP win shortly before the election, but I was not really surprised when this prediction came true. Mr. Grace has frequently demonstrated his acute insight into the myriad of aspects of Canadian politics and the NDP and Alberta are not as odd of a match as many people seem to think. Capitalism and socialism have never really been polar opposites, they are more the opposite sides of a single coin, perhaps the plugged nickel. Both think that the acquisition of money is the purpose for human existence, with the difference between the two being that capitalists think that money should be obtained through the free exchange of goods, services, and labour whereas socialists think it is better for the government to take money from those who already have it and give it to other people. I don’t wish to trivialize this difference – the former, being relatively the more honest of the two, is clearly to be preferred by sane, decent, and normal people over the latter, the preference of crooks, scoundrels, and fools – but the difference pales in comparison to that between the shared assumptions of capitalism and socialism and the truth that there are many things more important in life than making money.

For as long as I can remember I have heard Alberta described as Canada’s “most conservative province” but I have long questioned the accuracy of this designation. It might have been true at one time. In the fall of 1936, Stephen Leacock, the famous Canadian professor, economist, social commentator, and humorist began a lecture tour of the Western provinces and he described his experiences in My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West In Canada, which was published by Thomas Allen in Toronto in 1937. In his ninth chapter, “Monarchy in the West”, Leacock wrote that:

People who know nothing about it always imagine that the West of Canada is far less British than the East. Apart from the Maritime Provinces this is not so. It is even the reverse of truth.

From this he went on to argue that the large number of Americans who had moved up to the Canadian West between 1905 and 1914 made “no great difference as to the British connection and British institutions” because Americans had been British originally, and were reverting to their roots. He put it in these memorable words:

It used to be said that the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian. It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor. His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won’t miss what he shoots at.

If Leacock’s assessment of 1936 Alberta was accurate, that those settling the province valued Canada’s British institutions, had not a trace of republicanism, and that the former Americans among them would be the ones to fire that last shot on behalf of the Crown, then it might have been true to say, at that time, that Alberta was the most conservative province in the Dominion. That was then. This is now.

In Canada, a conservative is someone who believes in and supports the traditional British institutions of this country. This was historically true even of conservative French Canadians – and until the 1960s French Canadians were very conservative indeed – for while their primary concern might have been the preservation of their language, Roman Catholicism, and their traditional way of life, they understood that these things had been guaranteed by the Crown since 1774 and that had all of British North America gone over to the American Republic in the Revolution their language, religion, and culture would not have survived. The two best articulations of the political meaning of conservatism in the Canadian context, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and John G. Diefenbaker’s These Things We Treasure, the first by a central Canadian who grew up in Ontario and Quebec, the second by a Westerner, who grew up and practiced law in Saskatchewan before entering federal politics, both argued that Canada’s British institutions were the foundation and framework of our traditional rights and freedoms and that the latter stand and fall with the former.

If Alberta were the most conservative province in Canada that would mean that the ideas in the preceding paragraph would be more prevalent in Alberta than anywhere else in the country. Is this the case? Hardly. Indeed, one of the most curious things about many who identify as conservative in the province of Alberta is an inability to put two and two together and come up with four on this matter.

From 1963, when Lester Pearson became Prime Minister until 1984 when Pierre Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister, the Liberal Party of Canada waged an aggressive war against Canada’s British institutions and traditions. They removed the designation “Royal” from many institutions including the post office and the navy. They insisted that we needed a new flag of our own, even though the Canadian Red Ensign had been declared our country’s flag by Order-In-Council in 1945, three days after the end of the war in which it had been baptized our national flag in the blood of the soldiers who fought under it in our country’s finest hour. It was the Union Jack in the canton that made the old flag objectionable to them. These are just two examples, many more could be provided. At the same time the Liberal Party was attacking Canada’s British heritage and institutions it was also attacking and undermining the basic traditional freedoms of Canadians. 

 
Frederick Fromm's photo.
n the early 1970s they added a law against “hate propaganda” to the Criminal Code, which set a bad precedent for freedom of speech by making certain types of speech illegal on the basis of the thoughts expressed within them. Existing laws governing speech, such as the law against incitement, only made speech illegal when it called upon people to commit violence and break the law. Then, the Liberals passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, an attack on freedom of association patterned on the American Civil Rights Act of the previous decade, which further attacked freedom of speech with its chilling Section 13, designating hate speech as an illegal act of discrimination and defining it so broadly that virtually anything offensive to those protected against discrimination would qualify.
 
Finally, when they repatriated the British North America Act, they tacked onto it a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that under the guise of securing for us the rights and freedoms we already possessed by prescription as subjects of the Crown, nullified those rights and freedoms. (1) These attacks upon traditional and basic prescriptive rights and liberties, producing the oppressive politically correct atmosphere that Albertan “conservatives” rightly object to, were carried out at the same time and by the same people who were ripping apart our British heritage, proving the analysis of traditional Canadian Tories like Farthing and Diefenbaker, that our freedoms stand and fall with our British traditions, institutions, and heritage, to be correct.

Yet, many Albertan “small c conservatives” don’t seem to get this. To the last man they have an intense loathing for Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party.  Yet, many of them show little interest in turning to Canada’s British institutions, traditions, and heritage. Indeed, I have known more than a few of them to approach our British heritage with an attitude of contempt scarcely distinguishable from Trudeau’s own. Royalism is the sine qua non of conservatism in Canada, a non-negotiable, and Pierre Trudeau was notorious for, among other things, his disrespect for Her Majesty, yet you will encounter in Alberta, far more than anywhere else in Canada, people who claim to be Trudeau-hating conservatives but who are republicans rather than royalists. Self-identified Albertan “conservatives” tend to be continentalists – sometimes to the point of being annexationists – and free traders, both of which, ironically, are positions that historically belonged to the Liberal Party. It is further ironic that free trade was only embraced by the Conservative Party in the 1980s under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, the Conservative leader most hated in Alberta, whose misgovernment drove traditional Conservative Party voters, not only in Alberta but throughout the West, into the Reform Party of Canada.

This does not sound like a conservative province – more like a belligerently regionalist province with a chip on its shoulder. Localism is an important element of conservative thought, but in a form similar to the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, never anti-patriotism.

Where then does Alberta’s “conservative” reputation come from?

Is it the most socially conservative province?

When one thinks of social conservatism – in the sense of opposition to the moral and social disintegration that has taken place in the United States, Canada and the rest of the Western world since World War as manifest in such things as the collapse of social authority, no-fault divorce, birth control, abortion, the sexual revolution, cohabitation without marriage, serial marriages, alternative sexualities, and the like – three voices come to mind as having spoken louder on behalf of social conservatism in Canada than any other – George Grant, William Gairdner, and Ted Byfield. All three were from central Canada.

Yes, that’s right, all three. Ted Byfield, the founder of the Alberta Report which joined Christian social conservatism with a defiant Western and particularly Alberta populism, was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. That, in itself, does not perhaps say much, especially since moral and social decay, and worse, government brainwashing of the young against traditional norms, has gone further in Ontario, under the premierships of McGuinity and Wynne than anywhere else in the country. Nevertheless, it is in Alberta that the Rev. Stephen Boissoin was dragged before the Human Rights Tribunal – they have one of these odious kangaroo courts in Alberta too – for writing a letter to the editor, criticizing the actions of the politicized homosexual movement.

More substantially, Albertans more than any other Canadians, love American popular culture and oppose any attempt on the part of the national government to protect domestic Canadian culture. While our cultural protectionist policies have been a complete failure, and indeed have done harm rather than good, my point is that there is nothing that has done more to erode traditional social institutions, the authority of parents, teachers, and churches, and moral standards, than Hollywood films, pop and rock music, and television programming. A social conservatism that is wed to an objection, at the theoretical level, to cultural protectionism on the liberal grounds of market freedom, is a social conservatism that has laid down, raised the white flag, and given up.

The other grounds on which some have claimed that Alberta is the most conservative province are those of fiscal and economic conservatism. Fiscal conservatism is the idea that the state should live within its means and not export its costs into the future for posterity to pay. The economic ideas regarded as being conservative in Alberta are actually economic liberalism – free markets, free trade, and low taxes to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit, promoting economic growth that creates jobs and generates wealth. These two ideas are not always compatible. The goal of economic liberalism is constant growth so it always calls for lower taxes, whereas fiscal conservatism recognizes that to meet its goal, of not creating burdens for future generations, taxes may sometimes need to be raised in the present. It has been my impression that for most Albertan conservatives when these two ideas and goals clash, it is economic liberalism that wins out over fiscal conservatism. At any rate, actual economic conservatism is a variation of economic liberalism called economic nationalism, in which the government passes laws and taxes that favour and protect domestic production, thus exporting its costs not to future generations but to foreign companies and countries, as an entrance fee for access to the national market. Needless to say this idea would go over like a ton of bricks in Alberta.

Which brings us back to what I said at the beginning about capitalism and socialism – they are not polar opposites, but two sides of the same coin. That Alberta, the bastion of economic liberalism in Canada, would flip the coin and a give a majority government to the socialist party of high taxes and even higher spending, the very opposite of fiscal conservatism, is less of a shock than it would have been had the province managed to put fiscally conservative economic patriots into power.

The NDP is about more than socialism, of course. It is also about feminism, abortion-on-demand, anti-white racism, climate change alarmism, the Orwellian thought control that is political correctness, and the triumph of the abnormal over the normal and the average over the exceptional. Albertans will find to their horror that it is these latter things, even more than socialism, that they have in store for them under an NDP government.

The NDP is also, however, the most anti-Canadian of parties, when Canada is rightfully understood as the British country, confederated under the Crown in Parliament in 1867, upon a foundation rooted in Loyalism. The NDP wish to complete what the Pearson-Trudeau Liberals started in the 1960s-1980s, and obliterate our British heritage completely, abolishing the upper chamber in Parliament, and severing the country’s ties to the monarchy. Had Alberta truly been the most conservative province in the country, the NDP’s contempt for Canada’s British traditions and institutions would have prevented them from ever giving the NDP a single seat. Many Albertans, however, chose to join what ideas they had that were fiscally or socially conservative, to a very unconservative anti-Canadian, anti-patriotism that is not that far removed from that of the NDP, making this election’s outcome much less of a surprise, although no less of a disaster.

(1) Section 33 effectively nullifies all the rights and freedoms listed in section 2, and sections 7 through 15.

James Alcock Explains the History of the Red Ensign — the Flag of the Real Canada

James Alcock Explains the History of the Red Ensign — the Flag of the Real Canada
 
REXDALE, ON. December 19, 2013. Transportation and Vexillologist (flag expert) James Alcock outlined the rich history and development of the Red Ensign, which is the flag of the real Canada and which has never legally been rescinded, at the monthly meeting of the Alternative Forum here tonight.

Photo: Canada's Real Flag. We fly it at all our meetings. I've spoken beneath its glory at EURO conferences and in Britain.

 
 
Introducing Mr. Alcock, Forum chairman Paul Fromm, said: “The year 1965 marked a revolution, a near coup d’état in Canada. That was the year Lester Pearson changed our immigration policy and turned our backs on our traditional immigration sources — Britain and Europe — and flung the door open to the Third World. That same year, he established the rigged Royal Commission of Hate Propaganda, which brought us Canada’s “hate law” in 1971, which would make criticism of the changes in immigration legally risky. And, 1965 was the year Lester Pearson changed our flag. The old Red Ensign was a strong symbol of our Christian roots and the European founding/settler people who built this country. The new flag looked like the logo for some insurance company. Even the symbolism was cockeyed. The two bars represented the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans but they are red not blue.Frederick Fromm's photo. If you are about to replace a free European country with an anti-free speech Third World invasion you must replace the flag that reminds people of our real roots,” Mr. Fromm said.

 

“Young people are not told of the Re Ensign,” Mr. Alcock explained. “They are told Canada had no flag until 1965.”
 
In 1867, he explained. “the Fathers of Confederation wanted a flag to represent our ships at sea.. As part of the British Empire, we flew the Union Jack. The British Admiralty looked after flag issues. In 1868, we adopted the British Red Ensign with a crest which contained the crests of the four founding provinces of Canada — Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. This flag was approved for all merchant ships in Canada.”
 
Then, he said, “in 1892, the Admiralty granted approval for the use of this flag on land.”
 
Ironically, the normal rules are that the ensign with a blue background is to be flown on land and the ensign with the red background is to be flown at sea. However, much of Canada had been opened up by the Hudson’s Bay Company which used a red Ensign with the initials “HBC” on the fly.
 
To recognize this peculiar tradition, Mr. Alcock explained, Canada was allowed to use the Red Ensign on land and the Blue Ensign. Frederick Fromm's photo.
 
As time went on, it was decided that all British colonies were to use blue ensigns but territories, protectorates and Dominions like Canada could use the Red (background) ensign on land, he explained.
 
“By 1905,” Mr. Alcock continued,” Canada had nine provinces and their crests would not easily fit into a single crest of the fly. Therefore, a new design was needed.” In recognition of Canada’s valiant contributions in the First World War, in 1921, King George V awarded Canada with its own coat of arms which included the crests of England, Ireland, Scotland and pre-revolutionary France, with three Maple Leafs, representing the eastern, western and northern regions of Canada, all joined together on a single stem and coming together as a nation.Frederick Fromm's photo.
 
“In 1924, the Dominion Parliament approved the Red Ensign to be Canada’s flag abroad. After World War II, under the leadership of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, the Red Ensign became the flag of Canada. Viscount Alexander the Governor General delivered a Royal Proclamation that the Red Ensign was the national flag of Canada.”
 
In the 1950s, Quebec nationalists put pressure on the governing Liberals to change the flag and abandon the Union Jack within the Red Ensign. The green Maple Leaves representing growth and hope were replaced with red leaves, beautiful in their Autumn splendour but dying. Incongruously, the female bust on the Irish harp was removed and replaced with a knob.
 
 “During the Suez crisis in 1956, Egyptians charged that Canadians could not be neutral in a conflict that pitted Britain and France against Egypt, as the Canadian flag contained the Union Jack. Then External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson vowed he would get rid of the Red Ensign,” Mr. Alcock revealed. When he became Prime Minister in 1963, he proceeded to do just that.
 
“A lawyer has advised that the Royal Proclamation making the Red Ensign Canada’s flag has never been rescinded,” Mr. Alcock insisted. “Thus, it remains a valid flag of Canada.”
 
Mr. Alcock decorated the meeting room with wall flags of the various incarnations of the red Ensign. The Alternative Forum’s final meeting of the year concluded with some Christmas chocolates and a hearty politically incorrect “MERRY CHRISTMAS.”

 

Frederick Fromm's photo.