From Bad to Worse

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, March 18, 2021

From Bad to Worse

It is less than two months since I posted an essay entitled “Death and Doctors” that discussed how in the depravity of modern progressive liberalism those who are supposed to have dedicated their lives to healing disease and injury, alleviating pain and suffering, and saving lives are now expected to take the lives of the vulnerable at either end of the lifecycle through abortion or physician assisted suicide.   As I pointed out in that essay, both of these practices were against the law throughout most of Canadian history and the latter practice was only legalized quite recently.   It was in 2014 that Lower Canada – Quebec to those who are vulgarly up-to-date – became the first province to legalize physician assisted suicide and in February of 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada once again flexed the shiny new muscle that Pierre Trudeau had given them in 1982 by striking down the law against physician assisted suicide in its Carter ruling.   The Court placed a one year delay on this ruling coming into effect in order to give Parliament time to fix the issues with the law which the Court considered to be constitutionally problematic.   The Liberals, however, won a majority government in the Dominion election that year and so passed Bill C-14 instead, which completely legalized the practice and, indeed, allowed for physicians under certain circumstances, to go beyond assisting in suicide and actively terminate the lives themselves.   Note that while I would like to think that had Harper’s Conservatives remained in power the outcome would have been different, I am not so naïve as to be certain of that.   Indeed, the week after the Carter ruling, I had discussed how the Conservatives appeared to be preparing to capitulate on this issue in “Stephen Fletcher, the Byfields, and the Failure of Canada’s New Right”.

Now, one might be tempted to think that with regards to the issue of physician assisted suicide there is not much further in the wrong direction that our government could have gone than Bill C-14.   One would be very wrong in thinking so, however, as the government has just demonstrated.  

On February 24th of last year, a few weeks before the World Health Organization hit the panic button because a new virus that is significantly dangerous only to the very sorts of people most likely to be on the receiving end of euthanasia had escaped from China and was making the rounds of the world, Captain Airhead’s Liberals introduced Bill C-7 in the House of Commons.  David Lametti, who became Justice Minister and Attorney General after Jody Wilson-Raybould was removed from this position for refusing to go along with the Prime Minister’s corruption, was the sponsor.    The aim of the bill was to make it easier for those who wanted what they are now calling “Medical Assistance In Dying” or MAID – in my opinion the acronym produced by the old convention of leaving out words of three letters or less would be more apt – but were not already on death’s door to obtain it.   

As bad as the original draft of Bill C-7 was, it has undergone revisions over the course of the year since its first reading that make it much worse.   The most controversial revision is the one that includes a provision that is set to come into effect two years after the bill passes into law and which would allow access to the procedure to those who are neither at death’s door nor experiencing extreme physical pain and suffering but only have severe mental or psychological conditions.    Since it could be easily argued that wanting to terminate one’s own life constitutes such a condition – I suspect the vast majority of people would see it as such – the revised version of Bill C-7 looks suspiciously like it is saying that eventually everyone who wants a physician’s assistance in committing suicide for whatever reason will be entitled to that assistance.

Last week the revised bill passed the House of Commons after the Grits, with the support of the Bloc Quebecois, invoked closure on the debate and forced a vote.    Since the bill will eventually make euthanasia available to those with merely psychological problems, why exactly the Bloc would support a bill with the potential to drastically reduce the numbers of their voters remains a mystery.    Jimmy Dhaliwal, or rather Jagmeet Singh to call him by his post-transition name as we would hate to mis-whatever anyone, announced that the NDP would not support the bill.   This should not be mistaken for an example of principled opposition to physician assisted suicide for the mentally ill, it was rather an example of voting the right way for the wrong reason – Singh’s rabid hatred of Canada’s traditional constitution.    In my last essay I pointed out how he, in marked contrast with the more popular and sane man who led his party ten years ago, has taken aim against the office of Her Majesty the Queen and wishes to turn the country into some sort of lousy people’s republic.   Here it is his problem with the Upper Chamber of Parliament that is relevant.   He did not like that some of the revisions were introduced in the Senate rather than the House of Commons.    As for that august body, the Senate passed the bill yesterday, by a vote of 60-25 with five abstentions.   This is easily enough explained.    Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day, and even though the Senate is the chamber of sober second thought, its members were probably drunk.   The only mystery here is, with apologies to the Irish Rovers, whether it was the whiskey, the gin, or the three-or-four six packs.

A little under a year before Bill C-7 was introduced, it was announced in the federal budget that that the Dominion government would be spending $25 million dollars over a five year period to develop a nation-wide suicide prevention service.   In the fall of last year, after the information began to come out about just how badly the insane and unsuccessful experiment in locking down society to prevent the spread of a virus had affected the mental health of Canadians driving suicide rates through the roof, the government announced that it would be investing $11.5 million towards suicide prevention for “marginalized communities” that had been disproportionately affected by this mental health crisis, which they, of course, blamed on the virus rather than on their own tyrannical suspension of everyone’s basic rights, freedoms, and social lives.   Apparently the government cannot see any contradiction between prioritizing suicide prevention and providing easily available assistance in taking one’s own life.

By funding suicide prevention programs the government would seem to be taking the side in the ancient ethical debate that says that suicide is a bad thing and that it is wrong to take your own life.   The strongest version of this ethical position has traditionally been that of Christian moral theology.   Suicide, in Christian ethics, is not merely a violation of the Sixth Commandment, as the Commandments are numbered by the Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestants, but a particularly bad violation of this Commandment because it leaves no room for earthly repentance and is an expression of despair, the abandonment of faith and hope in God.   In other traditions, suicide is generally frowned upon but in a less absolute way.   In some traditions suicide brings shame upon the memory and family of the person who commits it except under a specific set of circumstances in which case it accomplishes the opposite of this by erasing shame that the individual had already brought upon himself and his family through his disgraceful actions, shame which could only be expunged in this manner.   It is easier to reconcile these traditions with each other – preserving one’s family honour is a very different motivation from despair – than it is to reconcile either with physician assisted suicide.    Physician assisted suicide in no way resembles what would have been considered an honourable suicide in any pagan tradition.  In Christian ethics, since taking your own life is so bad, getting someone else to help you do it or do it for you is downright diabolical.  

Perhaps the very worst thing about Bill C-7 is that gives even more power to the medical profession.   The liberalization of the Criminal Code in 1969 and the Morgentaler decision from the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988 gave doctors the power of life and death over the unborn.    This was already too much power, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carter in 2015 and the passing of Bill C-14 the following year gave them similar power over the elderly and infirm.   Last year, the Dominion government and every provincial government gave their top doctors dictatorial power over all Canadians, allowing them to suspend all of the basic Common Law rights and freedoms that are the traditional property of all of Her Majesty’s subjects regardless of Charter protections, power which they proceeded to disgracefully abuse as they gleefully and sadistically traded the serpentine staff of Asclepius for the Orwellian symbol of a boot stamping on a human face forever.   Now, Bill C-7 is extending their power of life and death even further in a most irresponsible way.   Physician assisted suicide is the foot in the door for outright euthanasia or “mercy killing”, extending the availability of the former to people who are not already dying will lead inevitably to doctors being allowed to perform the latter on those who are not already dying, and since it is doctors who get to say what is and what is not illness, mental or otherwise, the ultimate effect of this bill is to give the medical profession total and unlimited power of life and death over every Canadian.    Nobody should be trusted with that kind of power, least of all the medical profession as their behaviour over the last twelve months demonstrates.  Indeed, the disgrace they have brought upon their profession by their tyranny and their callous disregard for the social, psychological, spiritual and economic harm they have done with their universal quarantines, mask mandates and social distancing is such, that even seppuku on the part of all non-dissenting physicians may prove insufficient to restore their professional honour. Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 6:46 AM

SCHADENFREUDE

THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

The Canadian Red Ensign

MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2019

Schadenfreude

On the fourth Sunday in Lent we were given a sermon on the “love thy enemy” passage in the Sermon on the Mount. While it is probably not entirely within the spirit of that passage to engage in schadenfreude over one’s enemies’ misfortunes, I find it impossible to resist doing so since this era of triumphant liberalism afford few opportunities for such to a man of the right.

The Liberal Party of Canada has, over the years, made itself odious to all sorts of Canadians but most consistently to two distinct groups who despise them for very different reasons. The old Tories of the kind frequently but erroneously called “Red,” (1) i.e., the ones who prize Canada’s British and Loyalist history, traditions, and heritage, her constitutional monarchy, Westminster parliamentary system of government, and Common Law, her ongoing ties to the British Commonwealth and who associate all of this with an older, more organic, more rooted, vision of society than modern, individualistic, commercialism see the Liberals, quite correctly, as a party of rootless, modernizers who can conceive of value in no terms other than those of a price tag and whose goal is to sell out the Dominion and everything for which she once stood to Yankee capitalism for a quick buck. On the other hand, the rugged, rural, inhabitants of the prairie provinces of the Canadian West whom the Liberals and their academic and media fellow travelers dismiss with “redneck” and other, worse, epithets, have long loathed the Grits as being a party of totalitarian socialists who a) tax them to death, b) ignore, or worse, aggravate, their economic difficulties, and c) display the same arrogant contempt towards them that the Obama/Clinton Democrats display towards middle and working class red state Americans. Both of these negative views of the Liberals are entirely valid. (2) Someone like myself, who has belonged to both groups simultaneously for all of his life – a Redneck Tory, would be one way of putting it, I suppose – has particularly good reason to look upon the Liberal Party with utter abhorrence.

The Liberal Party has always been bad but it has sunk to new depths of depravity under the current leadership of Captain Airhead who, more than any of his predecessors, has brought shame and disgrace upon the office of Her Majesty’s First Minister in this Dominion. Will Ferguson divided Canada’s Prime Ministers into two categories, “Boneheads” and “Bastards”, but Captain Airhead has the distinction of being both. Smug, arrogant, self-righteous and preening, all of his public statements and actions, before and after taking office, have been calculated to project, with the cooperation of a fawning media, a carefully crafted image of himself. Since that image was that of the opposite of, at first, his predecessor Stephen Harper, then later of American President Donald Trump, it has all along resembled a bad caricature of the worst sort of loony leftist. He began his term by trying to import the migrant crisis that has been threatening to inundate Europe and create a Camp of the Saints scenario for half of a decade, creating a miniature version of America’s southern border crisis on the 49th Parallel, and at the end of his term, signed an insane and evil United Nations accord on migration which in effect, amounted to an agreement to surrender the Dominion’s essential right to maintain and police her own borders. Any and all criticism of this, or, for that matter, any of his other policies, was met with accusations of “racism”. He used the federal summer jobs funding program to coerce employers into agreeing with abortion on demand, having previously evicted pro-lifers from the Liberal Party, and otherwise attempted to shove his “woke” notions down all Canadians throats by legislation, or at any rate Parliamentary motions, condemning “Islamophobia” and protecting the new found “right” of individuals to choose or even make up their own gender identity. Jumping on board the bandwagon of an environmentalist movement that had long ago lost sight of its original, legitimate, goal – the conservation and preservation for future generations of natural resources and aesthetics – and gone to seed on apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, alarmism, he sabotaged and destroyed Canada’s energy industry and then, just this year, pulled the world’s most tasteless April Fool’s prank, by slapping down a carbon tax that will accomplish nothing but a needless rise in the cost of living, which hurts the poor and the working class the most. All the while his extravagance with the public purse has made his father, previously noted for his record deficits, look like a model of budgetary austerity in comparison. Speaking of money, he had the audacity to take the image of our first – and greatest – Prime Minister, the man who spearheaded the Confederation project and led the Dominion for most of its first two decades, fighting tooth and nail to get the railroad built and prevent the country from splitting up and falling into the avaricious hands of the republic to our south, off of our ten dollar bill and replace it with that of a woman who achieved fame, decades after the fact thanks to the Liberals’ desperate sifting of Canadian history for an equivalent of the figures in America’s Civil Rights Movement, for sitting down in a theatre.

It has been with much joy and pleasure, therefore, that I have been watching Captain Airhead’s image and popularity implode over the past couple of months. If there has been a cloud amidst all the silver lining of the SNC-Lavalin Affair it is that it took an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, corruption scandal to bring about the collapse of his reputation after all the evils mentioned in the preceding paragraph failed to do so. Perhaps the best way to look at that is to regard it as a case of the straw finally breaking the humpy back of the camel. To briefly summarize the scandal, a large corporation that has been a significant contributor to Liberal Party funds and which is based in the home province of the Prime Minister has been under prosecution for bribing a foreign government and last year our government snuck a bill in with the budget that allows for slap-on-the-wrist treatment of white collar crimes of this nature. When Jody Wilson-Raybould was shifted out of her Cabinet position of Minister of Justice and Attorney General in January of this year, rumours began to circulate that this was because she had refused to give in to pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office to apply the new rules retroactively to SNC Lavalin. As Jay Currie observed, the real scandal in all of this ought to have been the revelation that the government snuck legislation in to give their friends a break. Instead, what everyone jumped on was the compromise of an independent judiciary by inappropriate political interference in a prosecution. To put the same matter in Canadian rather than Yankee terms, as our press should have been doing all along although they have probably long ago forgotten what little they ever knew of Canadian civics, the rulings of the courts of the Queen-on-the-bench are not to be decided and dictated for political reasons by the ministers of the Queen-in-Council. Whether we speak Canadian or American it is a rotten and corrupt thing to do – and the Prime Minister’s being guilty of it would not have come as news to anyone still capable of remembering that we were not always at war with Eastasia. What, after all, did his inappropriate tweets following the Gerald Stanley jury acquittal last year constitute if not an unashamed and public display of such interference? Indeed, this was a far worse instance of such interference and one in which Jody Wilson-Raybould was equally guilty for it had all the appearance of promising changes to the jury selection process that would compromise such ancient principles as the right of the accused to presumption of innocence and the right of the accused – not the victim – to a trial of his peers and put in the place of the justice based on such principles, a primitive form of blood-based-vengeance, as if the Oresteia were being played out in reverse. It was at this point that Captain Airhead and the then-Justice Minister should both have received a summons to Rideau Hall and been told that Her Majesty no longer requires their services. Of course this didn’t happen and for that we ought to burn an effigy of William Lyon Mackenzie King annually for it was that, longest sitting Grit premier, who subverted the Westminster system and undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister’s Office turning it into a virtual dictatorship whenever there is a majority government..

As the SNC-Lavalin scandal developed, Captain Airhead’s team tried desperately to salvage their leader’s reputation, but their every effort, beginning with the self-immolation of Seymour Butts – my apologies to Matt Groening and his creative staff for appropriating what was originally a joke of theirs but I refuse to sully my own Christian name by admitting that it is shared by this man – was like adding fuel to the fire. Now, the very people who for the past four years swooned at the very mention of Captain Airhead’s name, are falling over themselves in their efforts to get as far away from him as possible. The scandal having broken on the eve of the next Dominion election things have gotten so bad for the Airhead Grits that they can think of nothing else to do than recycle the lame tactics that failed to win Hilary Clinton the last American presidential election by telling us that Andrew Scheer is courting the “far right” and, most hilariously since it has come a week after Robert Mueller announced that he could find no evidence that the Trump team had colluded with Russia, warning us about Russian interference in the upcoming election.

There is a lesson in this for Captain “Because it is 2015” Airhead if he is capable of learning it. Those who ride to the top on the crest of the wave of fashion, will crash and crash hard, when the tide goes out.Taylor Swift may very well have been right and she and whoever she was singing to at the time will “never go out of style”, but Justin, baby, you just ain’t her.

(1) This is due mainly to the socialist sympathies of George Grant and Eugene Forsey. While Grant attempted to argue that “socialism” was “conservative” his argument depended entirely upon a clever redefinition of socialism and he, like Forsey, acknowledged that this positive view of socialism was not that of the Tories as a group.

(2) This is true despite the fact that one view sees the Grits as being capitalist while the other sees them as being socialist. Capitalism and socialism are but two sides to the same coin which is the economy of the Modern Age. The true reactionary seeks wisdom, economic and otherwise, in the older traditions that predated the Modern Age. George Grant was a man who sought to do just that and this is reflected in his admirable criticism of capitalism but it was lamentable, pun intended, that he chose to stay within the limits of Modern thinking in using the term “socialism” for the opposite of where capitalism had gone wrong. Friedrich Hayek, on the other hand, was a man who made no effort whatsoever to think outside of the Modern box, and while he produced an otherwise admirable critique of socialism, could see it in no other terms than a return to pre-Modern feudalism, which it was not.