Under the online harms act, those guilty of hate speech could face up to life in prison. Photo by Getty Images
When I was a kid, we used to say that, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt.” Nowadays, offensive speech is considered violence. Silence is violence. And those whose words are deemed by the state to be most egregious will be treated like serial killers.
“All of us expect to be safe in our homes, in our neighbourhoods and in our communities,” said Justice Minister Arif Virani, after tabling Bill C-63, the online harms act, in the House of Commons on Monday. “We should be able to expect the same kind of safety in our online communities.”
Except many Canadians don’t feel safe in their communities anymore. Last summer, Statistics Canada reported that the police-reported crime rate in 2022 had increased by five per cent compared to a year earlier. The homicide rate rose for the fourth consecutive year, reaching its highest level since 1992.
Rather than focusing on the type of crime that puts Canadians’ property and physical safety at risk — the “sticks and stones,” if you will — the government has chosen to focus on the words being transmitted to our smartphones and laptops.
To accomplish this, the Liberals propose burdening “social media” platforms with heavy-handed regulations; creating a giant censorship bureaucracy to force compliance; and re-empowering kangaroo courts to persecute people for thought crimes.
Bill C-63 establishes a new digital safety commission, digital safety ombudsperson and digital safety office (to assist the commission and ombudsman), which will be responsible for ensuring revenge porn and child pornography are taken offline within 24 hours. (Though child porn is already taken seriously by social media platforms and, if history is any indication, it won’t be long before the new bureaucracy’s mission expands).
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Websites will be responsible for ensuring they have tools that allow users to flag posts and systems in place to determine whether they meet the definition of “harmful content,” which includes “content that induces a child to harm themselves,” “content used to bully a child,” “content that foments hatred,” “content that incites violence” and “content that incites violent extremism or terrorism.”
While social media companies will be required to submit data on the volume of harmful content found on their sites to the new digital safety commission, enforcement will be punted to the courts and the human rights tribunal, where the penalties are much steeper than merely having a post arbitrarily deleted.
The bill would reinstate parts of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which will once again put decisions over what constitutes online hate speech in the hands of the quasi-judicial Canadian Human Rights Commission (HRC) and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
It would also increase the penalty for anyone who “advocates or promotes genocide” to a maximum of life in prison — the same sentence, it should be noted, as was handed to Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most prolific serial killers and rapists. And it specifically prohibits website operators from notifying users when they have been reported to law enforcement.
Although the Criminal Code uses the standard definition of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any identifiable group,” there is no longer any consensus — within government or society — on what the term “genocide” actually means. This could have profound implications for how the online harms act is enforced.
Even the strict legal definition could be muddied by the fact that Trudeau accepted the conclusions of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “including that what happened amounts to genocide” — even though what took place doesn’t meet the legal definition of genocide.
As law professor Bruno Gelinas-Faucher told The Canadian Press in 2021, “A court could say … that the state has accepted responsibility under international law for the crime of genocide” — which is “a big deal.”
Even though prosecuting and enforcing penalties for the crime of promoting genocide would be left to the courts, vindictive users looking to punish those whose views they disagree with will be empowered to flag content, which websites will then have a responsibility to investigate (and possibly incentivized to censor in order to look as though they’re complying with the spirit of the law), and to submit frivolous complaints with the Human Rights Commission.
Do we trust the ideologues working for the HRC or the left-wing activists churned out by universities and scooped up by tech companies to determine whether any given social media post or online video meets the strict legal definition of promoting genocide? How could we, given that the term has been so watered down, no one seems to agree on what it means anymore?
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Jews and other supporters of Israel have been claiming that protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” are advocating genocide because a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean would necessitate the destruction of the Jewish state. On the other side are people who erroneously claim that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and that anyone who supports its war against Hamas is therefore advocating genocide.
I’ll let you decide which group is more likely to end up on the wrong side of Trudeau’s new censorship regime.
I have never thought very highly of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms which was added to our constitution in 1982. Note the wording there. The Charter is not itself our constitution but merely a part of it and a late addition at that. Those who make the mistake of calling the Charter itself our constitution have bought in to the American superstition that a constitution is a piece of paper that keeps a government from going bad through its magical powers. A constitution is a country’s system of law and government, the institutions that comprise it, and the traditions that inform their motions. The largest part of it is unwritten and this is true even in the American republic. Documents like our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the one the Americans call their Constitution are merely parts of the Canadian and American constitutions respectively. They are the laws that define and set limits to the power of government institutions. They have no power to keep government within those limits apart from the loyalty of those who hold public office in obeying them, the willingness of the courts to uphold them, and the faithful vigilance of the public.
My low estimation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not because I don’t like the rights and freedoms that are listed in that document. With a few exceptions, such as the “equality rights” written in Animal Farm style doublespeak in Section 15, these are rights and freedoms that I consider to be among the most valuable elements of our Common Law tradition. It is rather because the Charter has made these rights and freedoms less secure rather than more. In part this is due to flaws in the Charter itself such as the “notwithstanding clause” in Section 33 and the broad loophole in Section 1 which effectually nullify the Charter as far as the whole point of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms, that is to say that they are supposed to limit what the government can do so as to protect us from the abusive exercise of its powers, goes. The Charter’s loopholes and exceptions protect the government instead of us and for this reason former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was right to say that it is not worth the paper it is written on. It is also, however, because the Charter has encouraged a way of thinking about our rights and freedoms in a way that is the fundamental opposite of that which has historically belonged to our Common Law and traditional institutions of constitutional monarchy and parliament. It encourages us to think of our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by government to be limited or taken away by government freely as it sees fit, rather than our own property.
The consequences of this way of thinking having become pervasive have been most evident over the course of the last year. Section 2 of the Charter identifies four freedoms as being fundamental. The first of these is freedom of conscience and religion. The third is the freedom of peaceful assembly. The fourth is the freedom of association. The whole point, remember, of having the Charter designate these freedoms as essential is to place limits on government power, to tell the government that it must keep its hands off of these things. Yet ever since the World Health Organization declared the spread of the Wuhan bat flu to be a pandemic last March, our provincial governments have treated these freedoms as if they were completely non-existent, much less fundamental and protected by constitutional law and the Dominion government has constantly been urging the provincial governments to clamp down on us in violation of these freedoms in even more severe ways.
In 1986 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the case of R v Oakes. David Oakes had been arrested with drugs in his possession and under what was then Section 8 of the Narcotics Control Act was presumed to be guilty of trafficking. He challenged the constitutionality of Section 8 on the grounds that it violated the presumption of innocence, a civil right spelled out in Section 11 (d) of the Charter and which had been long established as part of the Common Law tradition. That the provision of the NCA being challenged did indeed violate the civil right in question was easily demonstrated, but the Court then had to decide whether the violation was justifiable under the “reasonable limits” loophole in Section 1 of the Charter. The Court’s ruling established what has ever since been the litmus test for this question. The Court ruled that for a law which violates a Charter right or freedom to be justifiable under the “reasonable limits” clause, it first had to have a “pressing and substantial” goal. Second, it had to meet the three qualifications of a) being “rationally connected” to the goal of the law, b) only impairing the rights and freedoms in question minimally, and c) not overwhelming the benefit hoped to be achieved with its negative effects.
It is quite obvious that the public health measures fail to meet the second of the three qualifications of the second part of the Supreme Court’s Oakes’ test. When the public health officer tells you that you cannot have any visitors to your home, even if you meet outside, as is currently the case in Manitoba, he is clearly not trying to only “minimally impair” your freedom of association. What he is doing is disregarding freedom of association entirely. The provincial legislature is not allowed to do this constitutionally, nor can it delegate to the public health officer the authority to do so. The legislature cannot delegate what it does not legitimately possess itself. When the public health officer orders churches, synagogues, and mosques not to meet for the largest part of a year, cancels the most important festivals of these religions, and only permits re-opening at a severely reduced capacity that requires churches to betray the tenets of their own faith and turn worshippers away, he is similarly disregarding freedom of conscience and religion rather than making sure that his orders only “minimally impair” this freedom. There is also plenty of evidence that the public health orders fail to meet the third qualification of the Oakes’ test as well. The costs of lockdowns, measured in the destruction of lives due to the breakdown of mental health and the rise in substance abuse and suicides, the erosion of community and social capital, and the devastation of businesses and livelihoods, has been tremendous and far exceeds any questionable benefits of these insane, unjust, evil and oppressive restrictions. Indeed, I believe the case could be made that the public health measures fail every single element of the Oakes’ test.
The provincial governments have gotten away with all this stercus tauri because they have until fairly recently met with only minimal resistance on the part of the Canadian public. This can be attributed to a number of causes. One of these, of course, is the hysterical and irrational fear generated by the mainstream corporate media that have been deceitfully and despicably portraying a virus that produces no to mild symptoms in most people who contract it, from which the vast majority of people who actually do get sick recover, and which in many if not most jurisdictions has an average age of fatality that is higher than the average expected lifespan of the general public, as if it were the second coming of the bubonic plague. Another cause is the new attitude which has been encouraged among Canadians, especially by the Liberals, since 1982, of regarding our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by the government in the Charter rather than what they are, our lawful property as free subjects of the Crown which it is the government’s duty to respect.
The assault on our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have come from the provincial governments. At the same time the second of the four freedoms designated as fundamental in the Charter has come under attack from the Liberals who are in power in the Dominion government. This is the freedom of “thought, belief, opinion and expression”. Whereas our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have never been this besieged before in Canadian history, our freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression has taken hits every time the Liberal Party led by a Trudeau has come to power in Ottawa. It has been less than ten years since we finally got rid of one of the vilest elements of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy, the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. While the entire Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 is, in fact, an affront to freedom of thought because, despite its title, it has nothing to do with protecting our rights either as Canadians or human beings from government abuses, but is instead all about prohibiting the crimethink of discrimination on the part of individual Canadians, Section 13 was the Act’s worst provision by far. By defining any electronic communication of information “likely to” expose someone protected against discrimination “to hatred or contempt” as an act of discrimination it in effect forbade all negative criticism of groups protected against discrimination or individuals belonging to such groups, regardless of the truthfulness or justice of the criticism in question.
Section 13 was finally abolished during the premiership of Stephen Harper thanks to a private member’s bill repealing the foul section that received enough support from Conservative MPs and Liberal MPs of the pre-Trudeau variety – these had not yet been purged from the party – to pass Parliament. Neither Stephen Harper nor his Minister of Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, who is currently overseeing the throwing of pastors in gaol and the barricading of churches in Alberta, had much to do with this for although they had spoken out against Human Rights Tribunals and their unjust infringement upon freedom of thought and speech on their road to power, in office they betrayed most of what they had once stood for, apparently having sold their souls to get there. The demise of Section 13 has long been lamented by Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, and when he became Prime Minister in 2015 he dropped a number of hints that he would be seeking to revive it. The appeal of Section 13 to Captain Airhead was based on more than just the fact that it had been originally introduced when his father was in power. More than any previous Liberal leader, Captain Airhead has been of the mindset that once a progressive goal has been attained, all debate about it ought to cease. This was evident even before he became Prime Minister when he purged the party of its pro-life members. More than any previous Liberal leader, he has enthusiastically endorsed fringe progressive causes that could not possibly achieve widespread popular support on their own merits without measures that intimidate and suppress dissenters. More than any previous Liberal leader he has been prone to tell Canadians who disagree with him that they are not welcome in their own country. He has used the expression “there is no place for X in Canada” far more liberally than any previous leader and with a much wider range of Xs. (1) In all of this he has demonstrated the sort of sick, censorious, mindset to which something like Section 13 appeals. In December of 2019, after he won re-election in the sense that he managed to squeak out a plurality despite falling majorly in the polls from where he had been four years previously, he instructed his Cabinet that fighting online “hate speech” would be one of their priorities in the new session of Parliament. Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault was specifically charged with finding a way to force social media platforms to remove what the Liberals consider to be “hate speech” within twenty-four hours of being told by the government to do so. This would be Section 13 magnified to the nth degree.
In response to this directive, Guilbeault came up with a bill that pursued the same goal as Section 13 through a different avenue. Last November he introduced Bill C-10, or “An Act to Amend the Broadcasting Act” into Parliament. This bill if passed would place internet media under the same regulatory authority of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as older electronic media such as radio and television broadcasters. By going this route, Guilbeault could maintain that his goal was not to censor what individual Canadians post on the internet, but to ensure that the companies that make shows and movies available through online streaming follow the same Canadian content guidelines as other broadcasters, a goal consistent with his portfolio as Heritage Minister. That having been said, the Bill as originally drafted would have given the CRTC regulatory authority over individual Canadians’ user-generated content on social media. When objections to this were raised the Bill was amended to include an exception for individual user-generated content, but this exception was removed in committee late last month around the same time that the government moved to shut down debate on a motion that the Conservatives had introduced calling for a review of whether or not the bill violated the Charter. None of this inspires much confidence in the Heritage Minister’s claim that the aim of this bill is cultural protectionism and not censorship of thought. On Monday, faced with backlash over all of this, Guilbeault promised that they would make it “crystal clear” that the user-generated content will not be subjected to the same sort of regulatory control as television programming. Needless to say, he ought not to be taken at his word on this. Indeed, Michael Geist, the law professor at the University of Ottawa who has been one of the foremost critics of Bill C-10, has already said that the amendment the Heritage Committee proposed on Thursday evening fails to follow through on Guilbeault’s promises.
It is worth observing here that with Bill C-10, Captain Airhead and Steven Guilbeault have returned to the very first thing the original Trudeau Liberals did to control the minds of Canadians and limit their freedom of thought. At the very beginning of the first Trudeau premiership the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker pointed out how the Liberals were threatening freedom of thought through the powers of the CRTC. In a speech entitled “The Twilight of Liberty”, the second included in the collection Those Things We Treasure (Macmillan, 1972), Diefenbaker said:
The Trudeau Government seems to be dedicated to controlling the thinking of Canadians. Through the power being exerted by Pierre Juneau, as Chairman of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, (2) private radio and T.V. station proprietors in Canada are frightened to speak, fearful of being subject to the cancellation of their licences. One such station was CKPM in Ottawa, which dared to have an open line program critical of the Government. Pierre Juneau did come before a Committee of the House and he uttered lachrymose words in reply to the criticism leveled at him that he wishes to determine what Canadians shall hear, and to deny them the right to listen to what they will. His attitude was different when he spoke to the Association of Private Broadcasting Companies and in effect stated: “When I ope my lips, let no dog bark.” Under him the broadcasting network owned by the people of Canada is allowed to broadcast what he permits.
Diefenbaker’s warning of decades ago has gone largely unheeded, perhaps because the CRTC’s official raison d’être is cultural protectionism which appeals to a much broader range of Canadians than its more covert purpose of limiting freedom of thought. Certainly right-of-centre Canadians of the more traditional variety, such as Diefenbaker himself or this writer, would have no objections to the idea that Canadian culture ought to remain Canadian. It needs to be pointed out, however, that the CRTC has been a total failure in this regards. Fifty-three years later, the Canada of 2021 is far more Americanized culturally than the Canada of 1968 was. Indeed, much of what Canadians regard as distinctly “Canadian” culture today, is merely Hollywood culture with a maple leaf stamped on it. Read the novels of Mazo de la Roche and Robertson Davies if you want a taste of the more authentic pre-CRTC Canadian culture. Since the CRTC failed in its official appointed task, probably because its real purpose was thought control all along, there is hardly grounds here for extending its reach over the new online media. Indeed, the scarcely disguised agenda of censorship and thought control behind the move to so extend its reach, is sufficient reason why this bill, amended or otherwise, must never be allowed to pass. It is also more than sufficient reason for voting the Trudeau Liberals who dreamed it up in the first place out of Parliament and never allowing them to resume power again. For as Rex Murphy pointed out earlier this week, “What is more galling and more threatening that the bill itself, however, is the set of mind behind it”, and that won’t go away even if the bill itself does.
(1) Disturbingly, the leaders of the other parties – including the present leader of the Conservatives – have taken to aping his example in this.
(2) The full name of this agency was changed into the awkward and absurd redundancy that it is now in 1976, but the acronym remains the same. Posted by Gerry T. Neal
The Pirates of Penzance was the fifth comic opera to come out of the collaboration of librettist Sir W. S. Gilbert and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. It premiered in New York City – the only one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas to open first in the United States rather than London – on New Year’s Eve in 1879, a year and a half after their fourth work, the H.M.S. Pinafore, had become a huge hit, both in London and internationally.
The hero of The Pirates of Penzance is the character Frederic, a role performed by a tenor. The opera begins with his having completed his twenty-first year – not his twenty-second birthday, for he was born on February 29th, a distinction, or rather, a “paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox”, that becomes essential to the plot in an amusingly absurd way – and the titular pirates throwing him a party. He has, up to this point, served as their apprentice due to a mistake that his nurse, Ruth, made, when he was a boy (she had heard the word “pilot” as “pirate” in his father’s instructions regarding his apprenticeship). The bass-baritone Pirate King (“it is, it is, a glorious thing to be a pirate king”), congratulates him and tells him that he now ranks as a “full blown member of our band”, producing a cheer from the crew, who are then told “My friends, I thank you all from my heart for your kindly wishes. Would that I can repay them as they deserve.” Asked what he means by that, Frederic explains “Today I am out of my indentures, and today I leave you forever.” Astonished, since Frederic is the best man he has, the Pirate King asks for an explanation. Frederic, with Ruth’s help – for she had also joined the pirate crew – explains about the error, and that while as long as the terms of his indentures lasted it was his duty to serve as part of the pirate crew, once they were over “I shall feel myself bound to devote myself heart and soul to your extermination!”
In the course of explaining all of this, Frederic expresses his opinion of his pirate colleagues in these words “Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable, but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation!”
As tempting as it is to continue this summary until we get to the “doctor of divinity who resides in this vicinity” and Major-General Stanley who, as he likes to introduce himself, is the “very model of a modern Major-General”, I have already arrived at the lines that are the entire point of my having brought all of this up.
I have stated many times in the past that I prefer to call myself a Canadian patriot rather than a Canadian nationalist. There are two ways in which patriotism and nationalism are usually distinguished. The first is a distinction of kind. Patriotism is an affection that people come by naturally as they extend the sentiment that under ordinary circumstances they acquire for the home and neighbourhood they grew up in to include their entire country. Nationalism is an ideology which people obtain through indoctrination. The second is a distinction of object. The object of nationalism is a people, the object of patriotism is a country. I have talked about the first distinction in the past, it is the second which is relevant in this essay. I love my country, the Dominion of Canada, and its history, institutions and traditions. When it comes to my countrymen, however, Canadians, and to be clear, I mean only those who are living at the present moment and not past generations, I often find myself sharing Frederic’s sentiments which were again:
Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable, but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation!
The more my fellow Canadians show a lack of appreciation for and indifference towards Canada’s traditions and institutions the more inclined I am to think of them, taken collectively, in such uncharitable terms. If opinion polls are any real indication – and to be fair, I do not think that protasis to be certain, far from it – this lack of appreciation and indifference has been very much on the rise among Canadians as of late.
Take personal freedom or liberty, for example. This is a vital Canadian tradition. It goes back, not just the founding of the country in Confederation in 1867, but much further for the Fathers of Confederation, English and French, in adopting the Westminster constitution for our own deliberately chose to retain continuity with a tradition that safeguarded liberty. Sir John A. Macdonald, addressing the legislature of the United Province of Canada in 1865 said:
We will enjoy here that which is the great test of constitutional freedom – we will have the rights of the minority respected. In all countries the rights of the majority take care of themselves, but it is only in countries like England, enjoying constitutional liberty, and safe from the tyranny of a single despot, or of an unbridled democracy, that the rights of minorities are regarded.
Sir Richard Cartwright made similar remarks and said “For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality”. This sentence encapsulated the thinking of the Fathers of Confederation – Canada was to be a British country with British freedom rather than an American country with American equality. In the century and a half (with change) since then, this has been reversed in the thinking of a great many Canadians. In the minds of these Canadians “equality” has become a Canadian value, although not the equality that Sir Richard Cartwright identified with the United States but a much uglier doctrine with the same name, and freedom has become an “American” value. The Liberal Party and their allies in the media and academe are largely if not entirely to blame for this. Indeed, this way of thinking was evident among bureaucrats and other career government officials who tend to be Liberal Party apparatchiks regardless of which party is in government long before it became evident among the general public.
About fourteen years ago, in the Warman v. Lemire case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, Dean Steacy, an investigator with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, was asked “What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?” His response was to say “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.” This despite the fact that in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which people like this usually although contrafactually regard as the source of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms in Canada, “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” is the second of the “fundamental freedoms” enumerated in Section 2. Perhaps Steacy did not think “speech” to be included in “expression”.
When Steacy’s foolish remark was publicized it did not win him much popularity among Canadians. Quite the contrary, it strengthened the grassroots movement that was demanding the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, a movement that was ultimately successful during the premiership of Stephen Harper by means of a private member’s bill despite it lacking the support of the Prime Minister and even, as many of us thought at the time, with his tacit disapproval. This demonstrates that as recently as a decade and a half ago, Dean Steacy’s knee-jerk rejection of Canada’s traditional British liberty as “American” did not resonate with Canadians. Can the same be said today?
The last year has provided us with many reasons to doubt this. In March of 2020, after the media irresponsibly induced a panic over the spread of the Wuhan bat flu, most provincial governments, strongly encouraged to do so by the Dominion government, followed the example of governments around the world and imposed an unprecedented universal quarantine, at the time recommended by the World Health Organization, as an experiment in slowing the spread of the virus. This involved a radical and severe curtailing of our basic rights and freedoms. Indeed, the freedoms described as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter – these include, in addition to the one quoted two paragraphs ago, the freedoms of “conscience and religion”, “peaceful assembly” and “association” – were essentially suspended in their entirety as our governments forbade all in-person social interaction. Initially, as our governments handed over dictatorial powers to the public health officers we were told that this was a short-term measure to “flatten the curve”, to prevent the hospitals from being swamped while we learned more about this new virus and prepared for it. As several of us predicted at the time would happen, “mission creep” quickly set in and the newly empowered health officials became determined to keep these excessive rules and restrictions in place until some increasingly distant goal – the development of a vaccine, the vaccination of the population, the elimination of the virus – was achieved. Apart from a partial relaxation of the rules over the summer months, the lockdown experiment has remained in place to this day, and indeed, when full lockdown measures were re-imposed in the fall, they were even more severe than they had been last March and April. This despite the fact that the evidence is clearly against the lockdown experiment – the virus is less dangerous than was originally thought (and even last March we knew that it posed a serious threat mostly to those who were very old and already had other health complications), its spread rises and falls seasonally similar to the cold and flu, lockdowns and masks have minimal-to-zero effect on this because it has happened more-or-less the same in all jurisdictions regardless of whether they locked down or not or the severity of the lockdown, while lockdowns themselves inflict severe mental, physical, social, cultural and economic damage upon societies.
Polls last year regularly showed a majority – often a large majority – of Canadians in favour of these restrictions and lockdowns, or even wishing for them to be more severe than they actually were. If these polls were at all accurate – again, this is a big if – then this means far fewer Canadians today respect and value their traditional freedoms than has ever been the case in the past, even as recently as a decade ago. It means that far too many Canadians have bought the lie of the public health officers, politicians, and media commentators that valuing freedom is “selfish”, when, in reality, supporting restrictions, masks, and lockdowns means preferring that the government take away the rights and freedoms of all your neighbours over you taking responsibility for your own safety and those of your loved ones and exercising reasonable precautions. It means that far too many Canadians now value “safety” – which from the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution to this day has ever been the excuse totalitarians of every stripe, Communist, woke, whatever, have used to tyrannize people and take away their freedoms – over freedom.
Over the past week or so, the mainstream media have been reporting opinion poll results that seem to indicate that a similar lack of appreciation for an essential Canadian institution is growing. According to the media the poll shows that support for replacing our hereditary royal monarch with an elected head of state is higher than it has ever been before, although it is not near as high as the lockdown support discussed above and is still below having majority support. There is good reason to doubt the accuracy of such poll results in that they indicate growing support for a change the media itself seems to be trying to promote given the way it has used the scandal surrounding the recent vice-regal resignation to attack the office of the Queen’s representative, the Governor General, when the problem is obviously with the person who filled the office, and the way in which she was chosen, i.e., hand-picked by Captain Airhead in total disregard of the qualities the office calls for, selection procedures that worked well in the past such as with Payette’s immediate predecessor, or even the most basic vetting. There is also, of course, a question over whether these poll results indicate an actual growth in small-r republican preferences or merely disapproval of the next in line of succession, His Royal Highness Prince Charles.
To the extent that this poll is accurate, however, it indicates that many Canadians have traded the Canadian way of thinking for the American way of thinking. Americans think of the Westminster system as being inferior to their own republican constitution because they consider it to be less than democratic with a hereditary monarch as the head of state. The historic and traditional Canadian perspective is that the Westminster system is superior to a republican constitution because it is more than democratic, incorporating the monarchical principle along with the democratic. To trade the Canadian for the American perspective on this is to impoverish our thinking. That a constitution is better for including more than just democracy is a viewpoint with an ancient pedigree that can be traced back to ancient Greece. That democracy is the highest principle of government and that a constitution is therefore weaker for having a non-elected head of state is an entirely Modern perspective. It cannot even be traced back to ancient Rome, for while the Roman republic was like the American republic in being kingless, it was unlike the American republic in that it was openly and unabashedly aristocratic and made not the slightest pretense of being democratic. Some might consider an entirely Modern perspective to be superior to one with an ancient pedigree, but such are ludicrously wrong. Novelty is not a quality of truth – the truer an idea is, the more like it is that you will be able to find it throughout history, stretching back to the most ancient times, rather than merely in the present day.
Indeed, to think that an elected head of state is preferable to a hereditary monarch at this point in time, that is to say after the clownish mayhem of the fiascos that were the last two American presidential elections, is to embrace the Modern perspective at the worst possible moment, the moment in which it has been utterly discredited. It is bad enough that Canadians have lately allowed the American presidential election style to influence the way we regard our parliamentary elections so as to make the question of which personality cult leader we want as Prime Minister into the primary or even sole factor to be considered in voting for whom we want for our local constituency representative. We do not need to Americanize the office of head of state as well.
We are better off for having a hereditary royal monarch as our head of state and a constitution that is therefore more than, not less than, democratic. Historically and traditionally, the institution of the monarchy has been the symbol and safeguard of our traditional rights and freedoms. I have long said that in Canada the monarchy and freedom stand and fall together. Therefore, if the polls are correct about waning Canadian support for both, this speaks very poorly about the present generation of Canadians. Which is why if these trends continue, Canadians who still love their country with its traditional monarchy and freedoms will be increasingly tempted to individually love their countrymen with affection unspeakable, but collectively look upon them with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
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.
