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Grave Error on Alleged Mass Graves in Canada

Genocide in Canada?

Anthony James Hall May 15
 
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Tornados of controversy are swirling around the subject of mass graves in Canada and Gaza. Mass graves in Gaza were created along with the Israeli occupation and destruction of hospitals in Gaza. These grave sites are being dug up between rounds of Israeli bombing of Palestinian civilians. The evidence of mutilated humans coming out of Gaza’s mass graves have reportedly contained evidence of organ removal, handcuffing of doctors and patients, as well as point-blank executions including shots to the head.

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/24140794/gaza-nasser-hospitals-al-shifa-graves-idf-hamas

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The discovery of mass graves is often seen as a hallmark that acts of genocide have occurred. While the association of mass graves with genocide is virtually irrefutable in Gaza, the same is certainly not the case in Canada. The discussion in Canada about the supposed discovery of unmarked mass graves adjacent to Christian residential schools is just now heating up.

From the late 1800s until the 1970s these federally-funded institutions were a core institution in providing education to Indian students. Issues concerning the provision of education to Indian groups often figured prominently in the Crown-Aboriginal treaty negotiations with Indian groups east of the Pacific watershed. To this day, this watershed marks much of the border of British Columbia with the rest of Canada.

The claims concerning the discovery of unmarked graves adjacent to Indian residential schools have been accepted as established fact by the government of Canada and much of the media since 2021. The story was quickly absorbed and adopted by the government of Justin Trudeau. In 2022 was adopted by Parliament without investigation as if it was a proven fact.

These claims are being subjected to vigorous scrutiny and a concerted effort of debunking. This project is being advanced by a formidable group of academics, journalists, retired judges and such. The volume is entitled Grave Error; How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools)

Before and After Pictures were a staple of Indian Residential Schools in Canada and the United States.The Idea was to illustrate the success of a “civilizing” process.

The Forward to Grave Error is written by the legendary neocon elder, Conrad Black. Black is the former Zionist media mogul and prison inmate who some see with justification as an authentic embodiment of a renaissance man. Besides making business history with his edgy (too edgy?) handling of Hollinger Inc., Black has written many important history books. I remember when I was working on my Ph.D. in Canadian history at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s that Black’s biography of former Quebec Premier, Maurice Duplessis, was required reading.

The co-editors of Grave Error are C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan. Professor Flanagan rivals the importance of Conrad Black in terms of the mark he has made for better or worse on Canadian history. Flanagan was at the core of the transformation of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada into the Conservative Party of Canada. The iconic leader of the CP was Stephen Harper, the core person in one of the few Canadian governments not dominated by Laurentian elites.

Flanagan took hold of the Social Credit legacy of Alberta that came to be embodied in Preston Manning’s Reform Party. Flanagan and Manning teamed up. Coming in from the edges was Torontonian Stephen Harper. By performing well as a student in Flanagan’s circle, Harper was successful in his quest to present himself as a credible Albertan politician.

Flanagan mixed the Manning heritage with Reagan-Thatcheresque enthusiasms of his circle of students who pretty much saw their prof as the rock star of the Texas North University in Alberta’s rising oil and gas metropolis. Among the Flanagan devotees were Harper, Ezra Levant, and the current Alberta Premier, Danielle Smith.

In the 1990s when I was a member of the Native American Studies Department at the University of Lethbridge, I saw Tom Flanagan as something of a nemesis. This American political scientist was one of the the original hires in 1968 at the nascent University of Calgary. In seeking to fit into his new academic home, Prof. Flanagan chose as his first Canadian subject the life and times of Metis Rebel Leader Louis Riel. Did Prof. Flanagan picture himself as the ring leader of an Alberta rebellion in the making?

Flanagan built on this base to become sufficiently expert on Aboriginal Affairs in Canada that he was able to hire himself out to federal agencies in order to give advice and to perform as an expert witness in court. I saw it then and see it now, Prof Flanagan’s expertise lay in directing judges how to undermining the exercise of Aboriginal rights as defined in their dubious rulings.

Regardless of my view of these matters, this aspect of Flanagan’s career has put him in a good position to intervene with insight into the growing furor driven by the supposed discovery of unmarked mass graves adjacent to Indian residential schools.

Thus it is that Black and Flanagan, both heavy hitters, have joined forces with a high-powered team of devoted writers and thinkers. Their shared aim is to say enough is enough to what they see as woke opportunists.

It is well known that Justin Trudeau tends to be especially generous with his patronage dollars to those who attach themselves to his agendas for First Nations peoples. Trudeau inherits a long Liberal tradition of using large concentrations of money to keep hand-picked leaders in partisan line with Liberal policies.

Not surprisingly, Trudeau did not do his homework as he has latched onto yet another divisive boondoggle to float his “post-national” contention that Canada is a genocidal country that should be enwrapped asap into more globalist webs of conniving intrigues. Of course in my view neither Black nor Flanagan have been exempt from implicating Canada in their own forms of conniving globalist intrigues.

This background helps explain how it is that a seemingly obscure book on an seemingly narrow subject is suddenly selling lots of copies in spite of it being banned here and there. As far as I know there hasn’t been a ritual book burning yet but the volume has definitely been removed from several libraries.

In the BC town of Quesnel, just looking at Grave Error was made to seem in April like an act of heresy to be punished by spurning, economic boycott and various forms of deplatforming. As in many small communities throughout Canada, Quesnel businesses depend on the ample purchasing power of many First Nations people in the region.

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-mayor-faces-calls-to-resign-over-wife-s-support-of-residential-school-denialism-book-1.6832598

Frances Widdowson attended the meeting with the intention of explaining her own essay, “Billy Remembers.” Even before she made the long drive from her home in Calgary to Quesnel, she was interrogated by a CBC journalist Jordan Tucker, a person who embodies the transcendental character of the Liberal government’s state broadcaster these days.

The Transcendent CBC Journalist, Jordan Tucker

Interview with Jordan Tucker (she/her) by Frances Widdowson Frances Widdowson

It seems Dr. Widdowson has been appointed by some overseeing committee of high wokedom as the main embodiment of a new type of heresy designated as a “residential school denialism” by those in and around the Canadian version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Investigation. Dr. Widdowson long wrangled with her former employer at Mount Royal because her discourse was allegedly not in line with the College’s policy of “Indigenization.”

In February of 2023 the then-President of the University of Lethbridge, Dr. Mike Mahon, gave the green light to silence Dr. Widdowson by overwhelming her scheduled talk with well-organized drumming, chanting and electric guitar screeching. The object of this attack on free speech and open debate was to block her capacity of making herself heard.

https://globalnews.ca/video/9453970/hundreds-of-protesters-drown-out-controversial-speaker-frances-widdowson-at-university-of-lethbridge

Many in Alberta and beyond saw this display as a very powerful symbol of the DEI intolerance that is replacing independent thought and articulation with group think in increasingly authoritarian universities throughout the West. As a result of the extension of the debacle in Gaza to sharp divides on university campuses, this pattern of sacrificing to large donors of control over curriculum and faculty staffing is being put on full display by many prominent IVY League schools in the USA.

I agree with the authors in Grave Error that the existence of unmarked mass graves adjacent to Indian residential schools have not been proven. The great weight of evidence points against the conclusions that arose first from a press release in May of 2021. The release came from Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc (Kamloops Indian Band). Without presenting credible evidence, Chief Casimir made the startling claim that an unmarked mass grave containing 215 bodies had been discovered in an apple orchard beside Kamloops Indian residential school.

I agree for the most part with Grave Error’s authors. They maintain that a solid evidentiary basis has not been established to prove the new thesis that mass murder and mass graves constitute an integral part of the history of Indian residential schools in Canada.

I do not agree, however, that these findings preclude the need to look at the possible role of various forms of genocidal activity in the genesis of northern North America from pre-Columbian times to the Canada that exists today. I find the conclusion that because certain claims about the existence of mass graves attending Indian residential schools have been disproven, the possibility of genocidal expressions in Canada’s history need never come up again.

I think it ill-advised to declare that all of Canadian history is devoid of genocide before and after the UN’s creation of the Genocide Convention in 1948. Canadian history does not exist in an isolated void. I have repeatedly put forward the view that the entire Western Hemisphere has been the site since 1492 of an inter-generational genocide that can be pictured as a single monumental event whose commemoration might be marked by a different kind of holocaust memorial.

For now, however, I’ll leave it at that. I’ll simply add that Dr. Widdowson and I are working together these days. We are engaged in a case study of the assault on free speech and open debate at University of Lethbridge, where I taught for 26 years. See the announcement of our upcoming meeting on the matter in the addendum below.

______________

Addendum

10 May, 2024
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Associates;

Above is the poster for an important upcoming public event on the afternoon of Saturday May 25 at the main branch of the Lethbridge Public Library. Many of you will remember when Dr. Frances Widdowson was overwhelmed by chanting, drumming and the screech on an electric guitar. The object of the ruckus was to prevent the speaker from delivering a public presentation in the Atrium of the University of Lethbridge. The censorship action proved to be a “success.”

Dr. Widdowson was silenced and those who came to hear her talk were deprived of her articulation. Certain faculty members had decided Frances Widdowson was afflicted with a malady they labelled “residential school denialism.” 

Some faculty members decided to act on this judgment. For their students, these faculty members painted a picture of Dr. Widdowson as an embodiment of a constituency they identified as hostile to the idea that all residential schools at all times should be equated with genocide.

Disgruntled faculty and others pressured U of L President, Dr. Mike Mahon, to cancel Dr. Widdowson’s lecture after he had already announced that his Office approved of her talk. Some interpret what happened as a cave in by Dr. Mahon to political pressure. He ordered that a speaker on campus should be cancelled because she was the bearer of interpretations that some faculty and students wanted to censor. The rest, as they say, is history.

The key point in this matter is not that one side or the other is right or wrong. Individuals especially in the hallowed Halls of Academia have a right and sometimes even a responsibility to decide such matters for themselves. The key point is that academics must be able to research, argue and articulate issues in an environment of protected free speech and academic freedom regardless of the prevailing group think. Certainly it is not the role of academic administrators to jump in arbitrarily by making themselves instant experts in whatever academic debate they want to dominate and/or disrupt.

Dr. Widdowson has written academic essays and books in and around the topic of the history of Indian education in Canada. Whether one agrees with her views or not, it was wrong to have tried to silence her at an Alberta University. I attended the organized shutdown of her talk. In my view and in that of many other people I have since met and talked to about what happened, the shutdown of Dr. Widdowson in February of 2023 was not a proud moment. It was a very troubling occurrence in the history of the institution of higher learning where I taught from 1990 to 2016.

I moved to Lethbridge in 1990 to be Associate Professor of Native American Studies. In the early weeks of 2016 this tenured full professor was abruptly suspended without pay completely outside the rules of the Board’s collective agreement with the Faculty Association. Then in 2017 the matter went to court in the Lethbridge Court of (then) Queen’s Bench. 

By court order the judge ruled that I should be reinstated into my academic position at the U of L. As I plan to discuss, there is every reason that the Board’s objective in trying to deplatform me was to silence my interpretations because my views went contrary to the agenda of a very rich and powerful lobby. I would still like to know how this lobby gained such a tight grip on the policies and actions of the administration of the University administration. 

As the commentator in Frances’ forthcoming presentation on 25 May, I’m sure I will disagree with her on many points. Agreeing to disagree is a vital attribute of healthy academic life. But trying to shut down those with whom one disagrees, undermines the entirety of the whole academic project that is supposed to be a fair and balanced meritocracy.

When I met Frances after the event where her talk was shut down, we of course compared notes about our treatment at the University of Lethbridge. Eventually we came up with the idea of mounting the initiative we started earlier this year. In due course, as this process unfolds I intend to talk about my own experiences with the process of being deplatformed in ways that include many elements outside the set of facts outlined above.

I never did get back into the classroom. In 2018 I decided to retire. I did retire as a full professor in good standing. I gained the new title of Professor Emeritus. I am announcing here that I am henceforth acting in my capacity as a Professor Emeritus of the University of Lethbridge in the remaining part of the process that Frances and I have mounted. I think my taking on this responsibility in unusual times and under unusual circumstances is entirely consistent with the duties of an individual carrying the title of Emeritus Professor. 

As I see it, I shall be speaking and acting in this process from within the U of L’s faculty. I have devoted some of the best years and professional efforts of my life to my academic endeavours at the University of Lethbridge. I would like to see the institution thrive and prosper. 

As a senior faculty member I want to help in the process of making some suggestions that might assist our school in getting back on track. A University simply cannot fulfil a mission to be a school of authentic higher learning without creating a sound foundation for the expression of unhindered speech and academic freedom.

Since retiring from teaching I have continued to involve myself in research and publication as well as in very active community involvement starting with the manufactured COVID crisis. The questions come up in my community work: Where are all the hundreds of University professors and why are they not contributing more actively to working through issues of immense import– life and death issues in, for instance, public health matters. 

What kind of message does our university send when it shuts down, rather than encourages, the highlighting of a diversity of perspectives in public discourse in local, regional, national and global contexts? The community wants and deserves better than what we have seen from the University of Lethbridge in recent years.

In this context I am not making any claim about who is right or wrong in the matters we have recently faced and are facing. But in my view there is no doubt that the University of Lethbridge has become way too isolated and partisan in key aspects of the community life of this region.

Please consider attending the public event at the Lethbridge Public Library on Saturday May 25 at 2 pm.

Sincerely,

Dr. Tony Hall

Professor Emeritus,

University of Lethbridge

Public Order Emergency Commission Report Marks the Decline of Freedoms in Canada

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C3RF Update, 24 Feb 2023 – What if?

On the crocodile’s tail and back

The release of the Public Order Emergency Commission Final Report on 17 February 2023 continues to reverberate across the country.  Witness Ryan Alford’s analysis that sees the report as promoting an unprecedented “crackdown on free speech” while noting that recommendations aimed at “modernizing” the reasons for invoking the Emergencies Act need to be rejected by Parliament.  Then there is Jessie Kline who bluntly states the Report is a “slap in the face to Canadians”  even as Rupa Subramanya declared that democracy in Canada “died a little” with the release of the Report.  Could it be that all of this criticism, along with the C3RF analysis offered here, are confirmations that Canada is well down the path to becoming the world’s first “post-national state” with “no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” 


Rupa Subramanya, “democracy died a little” in Canada with the POEC Final Report

One could be forgiven for seeing a bit of an analogy between Trudeau’s call for Canadians to join him in celebrating a new post-national Canada and the age-old fable “The Frog and the Crocodile”.   In the fable, the frog looks longingly at leaving his damp environs to traverse a snake-infested river to drier ground – in much the same way that Canada has come to look at “build back better” as the new utopia.  Meanwhile, the crocodile offers the frog a ride to this new, dry utopia promising there will be no harm inflicted on the frog – in much the same way that Prime Minister Trudeau assures Canadians that transforming and resetting Canada’s economy will result in more jobs in a new, higher-tech economy.  In a progressive and tentative fashion, the frog agrees to hitch a ride first on the crocodile’s tail and then on his back – ostensibly to allow the crocodile to better steer.  Then the frog was convinced to ride on the reptile’s head for a better view and then, finally and disastrously for the frog, on his nose to help relieve an itch.  And so it goes with Canadians as they are progressively nudged and coerced to give up their national sovereignty and civil liberties in order to realize a more sustainable and just world and be stalwart global citizens – like our Prime Minister!


Frogs and crocodiles – good traveling companions?

Canada’s journey from a free and democratic nation, primarily concerned with its own sovereign interests, to a post-national one can be seen as a progression from the tail, back, head and nose of a global beast.  The jumping onto the tail of this behemoth can be seen to have occurred in 2015 when the Conservative government-of-the-day signed onto the United Nation’s Agenda 2030.  Not to be outdone, the follow-on Liberal government, in the same year, would move the frog further along onto the back of the beast by signing onto the Paris Agreement.  Agenda 2030 would commit Canada to prioritize its legislative efforts to accommodate the 17 Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) on the way to realizing a just world.  The Paris Agreement would commit Canada to reducing its Green House Gas emissions markedly in an effort to hold global temperature increases to no more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  Between the two, the die had been cast for Canada to forego the interests of its own citizens and embrace those of unelected authorities in faraway bureaus.


Did Prime Ministers Harper and Trudeau saddle Canadians up on the globalist crocodile in 2015?

To the crocodile’s head

As per the fable, the crocodile had to use its considerable powers of persuasion to get the frog up to its head.  He beckoned by saying “Oh, come now. It’s a beautiful view! Surely you don’t think that I’m going to eat you after we’re halfway across.”  The frog relented as he was curious to see the view from atop the crocodile’s head and they were past the point of no return anyway.  Everyday Canadians, however,  would be a bit more circumspect when it came to giving up their civil liberties to make good on globalized demands to accommodate mass migration, de-industrialization and vaccination programs.  Indeed, when it came to immigration policies they would take a look at the lax and disastrous migration flows from the Middle East and North Africa into Europe in 2015 and express concerns.  Did the new Liberal government realize that the “no-go zones” and violent crimes that were surging across Europe should be seen as alarm bells for Canada? 


Canadians balk at traveling to the “head” of the crocodile due to safety and security concerns?

In the end, the government would have to forego persuasion in favour of nudging Canadians into acceptance through triangulation strategies designed to divide and conquer.  And so it was that a very unpopular Motion M-103 was floated in 2017 to accuse Canada and certain Canadians of being “systemically racist” and Islamophobic.  If rank and file citizens couldn’t be convinced to fall into line with globalist narratives they would bloody well be named and shamed into accepting them.  One way or another, they would be coerced into making the journey to the crocodile’s head where they could better see the errors of their ways and atone.  Naming and shaming, however, might get Canadians moving but it would not be enough to motivate the majority.  Accordingly, triangulation efforts would be expanded to suppress inconvenient, fact-based counter-narratives.


Canadian House of Commons passes M-103 with little public support – too bad for us?

These inconvenient storylines would be rebuffed with campaigns that cited such speech as “hate”-based or mis/disinformation.  And so we saw the advent of a “Digital Charter” to keep government-defined hate speech offline and legislation such as Bill C-11 to regulate your internet user-generated content.  Such legislative efforts are proceeding in lockstep with many other initiatives from a wide range of institutional agencies that outright “cancel” the life and work prospects of wrong-thinkers.  How else to explain the raft of medical doctors who have had their medical licenses suspended or canceled for offering patient-specific advice in contravention to the narratives being disseminated by their controlling colleges of physicians and surgeons?  Then there are the teachers who lose their positions for questioning the woke narratives surrounding Residential School deaths.   Some are even advocating such heretical speech be punished to the full extent of the law?  Canadians would be herded to the head of the crocodile even if it meant the clock would need to be rolled back to the 17th century and the times of Galileo.


Heretical Canadians risk Galileo-like punishments for wrong-think?

To the crocodile’s nose

Getting the frog onto the nose of the crocodile would enable an endgame that would smash any dream of accessing a utopian homeland.  Instead, the way would be open to effecting an intended reality that embraced not only the loss of freedom but a “terrific chomp” that ended the little frog’s life.  In the Canadian sense, it became obvious that such a transition would require more than just a “nudge” or “controlling the narrative” as protests like Freedom Convoy 2022 made it obvious that everyday Canadians had some pesky questions that just wouldn’t go away.  Shutting down such curiosity and concerns would require efforts that went beyond controlling the narrative to controlling the actual behaviours of Johnny and Janie Canuck.  And so we see an accelerated rush to build global systems capable of surveilling and tracking the activities and movement of citizens respectively – systems founded upon digital IDs.


Digital IDs required to advance the globalist/ crocodile agenda?

The invocation of the Emergencies Act was instructive in this sense as it provided the backdrop that allowed Canadians to glimpse the real utopia that exists on the other side of the river – rather than the one that has been advertised to them.  This was the case as the Act unleashed the federalized banking system onto the moms and pops who had the temerity to make $20 donations to Freedom Convoy 2022 “insurrectionists”.  It did so by freezing their financial accounts regardless of their personal circumstances and without the due process guaranteed, until now, by the Charter.  The fact that this draconian move struck too close to home for the comfort of those working with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to implement digital IDs for financial purposes was made clear when the Canadian Banking Association scrambled to escape blame.  After all, it was their “legal obligation” to lock down accounts that the RCMP requested member banks to freeze.  It would seem that the freezing of Freedom Convoy 2022 participant bank accounts may have provided an inconvenient and unwelcomed preview of what awaits hapless Canadians in the new post-national Canada on the other side of the river.


Angelina Mason, CBA General Counsel and VP, banks had a “legal obligation” to freeze accounts

The fact that the Liberal/NDP government of Canada is chomping at the bit to introduce digital IDs for all of us has been evident throughout the course of their handling of the Wuhan virus pandemic.  Witness their working together with the WEF, the Netherlands and several airlines and airports to introduce a Known Traveler Digital Identification system and the tenacity displayed in keeping an ArriveCAN application in place even though it crashed Canadian airport throughputs.  One might think that digital ID control measures are now a thing of the past as these initiatives have either stalled or been made voluntary.  This is not the case, however, as we now see new efforts to implement them through Canada Health Transfer deals being made between the federal government and the provinces.  The transfer of related funds will be dependent on the digitization of patient information in each participating province in accordance with Canada Health Infoway protocols – protocols that include an International Patient Summary dedicated to allowing for the transfer of your medical data, including vaccination status, worldwide.  One might well surmise that the individual rights and freedoms of Canadians will be well and truly done if they jump onto the crocodile’s nose by accepting such digital ID initiatives.  Chomp chomp?


Will digital ID put us all on the crocodile’s nose?

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Freedom Under Siege: Bill C-10

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Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, May 7, 2021

Freedom Under Siege: Bill C-10

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

From Bad to Worse

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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

Jagmeet Doesn’t Know Jack!

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Jagmeet Doesn’t Know Jack!

In the 2011 Dominion election, under the leadership of Jack Layton, the New Democratic Party which is the officially socialist party, as opposed to the unofficial socialist parties such as the Liberals and the Conservatives, won the highest percentage of the popular vote and the most number of seats it has ever received.   While the Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, won the election and formed a majority government, Layton’s NDP won enough seats to become Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a role which, during Conservative governments, had always before been held by the Liberals.     While the unpopularity of Grit leader Michael Ignatieff undoubtedly contributed to this, it was clearly a credit to the charismatic leadership of Layton himself.   Sadly, he was not able to perform the role of Official Opposition Leader for long.   Cancer forced him to step down from his duties and in August of that year took his life.

In the 2019 Dominion election, by contrast, the NDP’s percentage of the popular vote fell drastically, and it moved from third party to fourth party status as it lost twenty seats from the forty-four it had won four years previous.   What is very interesting about this is that this was the same election in which the Liberal government dropped from majority to minority government status.   The Liberal drop was not difficult to explain – the year had begun with the government rocked by the SNC-Lavalin scandal and during the election campaign itself another scandal, which would have utterly destroyed anyone else, broke, as multiple photographs and even a video of the Prime Minister, who had marketed himself as the “woke” Prime Minister, in blackface surfaced.   What was surprising was not that the Liberals dropped in the popular vote and lost seats, but that they managed to squeak out a plurality and cling to power.   This makes it all the more damning that the New Democrats, ordinarily the second choice for progressive Liberal voters, did so poorly in this election.

Just as most of the credit for the NDP’s success in 2011 belonged to its late leader Jack Layton, so most of the blame for its failure in 2019 belongs to its current leader, Jagmeet Singh.   Despite the efforts of the CBC and its echo chambers in the “private” media to promote his brand, Singh, was clearly unpalatable to the Canadian public.   Whereas a competent politician who finds himself unpopular with the electorate would ask what it is about himself that is turning off the voters and try to change it, Singh is the type who declares that the problem is with the electorate, that they are too prejudiced, and demands that they change.   That this attitude, indicative of the kind of far Left politics Singh embraces – he is the furthest to the Left any mainstream party leader has ever been in Canadian politics – is itself a large part of what turns the voters off, is a fact that eluded him, continues to elude him, and will probably elude him forever.

That the contrast could hardly be greater between the late Jack Layton and Jagmeet Singh received another illustration this week.

On Sunday, a much hyped interview between Oprah Winfrey and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex was televised.   I did not watch the interview, as I make it a point of avoiding Oprah who, in my opinion, has done more than anybody else to turn people’s minds to mush, despite having a book club named after her.  The Sussexes consist of Meghan Markle, an ambitious American actress, and her husband, the younger son of the Prince of Wales.   Last year, you might recall, this couple was all over the news before they got pre-empted by the bat flu, because Markle, who obviously is the one wearing the pants between the two of them, having learned that unlike the Hollywood celebrity to which she had aspired, royalty comes with public duties as well as privilege, duties which do not include, and indeed conflict with, the favourite Hollywood celebrity pastime of shooting one’s mouth off, no matter how ill-informed one is, about every trendy, woke, cause, wanted to keep the royal privileges while giving up the royal duties, and was told, quite rightly, by the Queen, that this was not the way things were done.   The couple left the UK in a huff, stopping temporarily in Canada before they eventually relocated to the United States.    As I said, I did not watch the interview, but have caught enough of the highlights of it and the post-interview commentary to know that it was basically Markle throwing herself a “me party” and hurling mud at her inlaws and the ancient institution they represent, for not making everything all about her.  

Sane, rational, people surely realize that interviews of this sort speak far more about the spoiled, egotistical, narcissism of the individuals who give such interviews than they do about the people and institutions criticized in such interviews.   People like Jagmeet Singh, however, regard them as opportunities to promote their own agendas.

Singh, actually succeeded in making the current Prime Minister look classy by comparison, something which is exceedingly difficult to do.   The only comment the Prime Minister made following the interview was to say “I wish all members of the Royal Family the very best”.   Singh, however, ranted about how he doesn’t “see the benefit of the monarchy in Canadians’ lives”.   As with Markle’s interview this comment says far more about the person who made it than the institution he seeks to denigrate.

To fail to see the benefit of the monarchy in Canadians’ lives is to fail to see any benefit to Canadians in a) having their country remain true to her founding principles, b) having a non-political head of state, or c) having an institutional connection to the United Kingdom, Australia, and the other Commonwealth Realms that in no way impedes our country’s sovereignty over her own domestic affairs and international relationships.   To fail to see any benefit in any of this is to display one’s own blindness.

That Canada’s founding principles require her to retain the monarchy is an understatement.   Loyalty to the monarchy is the founding principle of Canada, at least if by Canada we mean the country that was founded in 1867.   Quebec nationalists like to point out that Canada was first used for the French society founded along the St. Lawrence long before Confederation, which is true enough, but the conclusions they draw from this are contradictory non-sequiturs.   At any rate, the original French Canada was, most certainly, a society under a monarch, the monarchy of France, and, contrary to the delusions of the Quebec nationalists who are products of the “Quiet Revolution” (against traditional, Roman Catholic, Quebecois society and culture), it was not moving in the direction of the French Revolution when the French king ceded Canada to the British king after the Seven Years War, a fact that is evinced by Quebec’s remaining ultramontane in its Catholicism and seigneurial in its society long after the Jacobins had done their worst in France.   Before Confederation began the process of uniting  all of British North America into the Dominion of Canada in 1867 – the Canada we speak of as Canada today – an English Canada, in addition to a French Canada, had come into existence, and this English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists, that is to say, those among the Thirteen Colonies which revolted against Britain and become the United States who remained loyal to the Crown, and fled to Canada to escape persecution in the new republic.    They were able to flee to Canada because French Canada, although the ink was barely dry on the treaty transferring Canada from the French king to the British, did not join in the American Revolution against the Crown which had, to the upset of the American colonists, guaranteed its protection of their culture, language and religion.  During Confederation, the Fathers of Confederation, English and French, unanimously chose to retain a connection to the larger British Empire and to make the Westminster system of parliamentary monarchy our own (it was Canada’s own Fathers of Confederation, not the Imperial government in London, who brought all of this into the Confederation talks, and, indeed, when the Fathers of Confederation wished to call the country “The Kingdom of Canada”, London’s input was to suggest an alternative title, leading to the choice of “The Dominion of Canada’).    It is the Crown that is the other party to all of the treaties with the native tribes, who generally, and for good cause, respect the monarchy a lot more than they do the politicians in Parliament.   At several points in Canadian history, both on the road to Confederation, such as in the War of 1812, and after Confederation, such as in both World Wars, English Canadians, French Canadians, and native Canadians fought together for “king and country”.   The monarchy has been the uniting principle in Canada throughout our history.  To reject the monarchy is to reject Canada.

That anybody in March of 2021 could fail to see the benefit of having a non-political head of state demonstrates the extent to which ideology can blind a person.   Four years ago, the American republic had an extremely divisive presidential election after which the side that lost refused to acknowledge the outcome, spent much of four years accusing the winner of colluding with a foreign power – Russia – to steal the election, and giving its tacit and in some cases explicit approval to violent groups that were going around beating people up, using intimidation to shut down events, and rioting, because they considered the new American president to be a fascist.   Last year, they held another presidential election which was even more divisive, with a very high percentage of Americans believing the election was stolen through fraud, with the consequence that Congress had to order a military occupation of their own capital city in order to protect the inauguration of the new president against their own citizens.   This is precisely the sort of thing that naturally ensues from filling the office of head of state through popular election, politicizing an office that is supposed to be unifying and representative of an entire country.   This is not the first time in American history that this has happened.   Less than a century after the establishment of the American republic, the election of the first president from the new Republican Party led to all of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line seceding from the American union and forming their own federation, which the United States then invaded and razed to the ground in the bloodiest war in all of American history.   Generally, when a country replaces its hereditary monarchy it initially gets something monstrously tyrannical which may eventually evolve into something more stable and tolerable.   When the British monarchy was temporarily abolished after the English Civil War and the murder of Charles I, the tyranny of Cromwell was the result, which was fortunately followed by the Restoration of the monarchy.   In France, forcing the Bourbons off the throne resulted in the Jacobin Reign of Terror.   The forced abdication of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties after World War I led directly to the rise of Adolf Hitler, whereas the fall of the Romanovs in Russia brought about the enslavement of that country to Bolshevism.   To wish to get rid of the hereditary monarchy in Canada is to fail to learn anything at all from history.

I won’t elaborate too much on the third point.   Either you see an advantage in the Commonwealth arrangement in which the Realms share a non-political, hereditary monarchy, but each Realm’s Parliament has complete control of its own affairs, or you do not.   Jagmeet Singh does not appear to care much for Canada’s relationship with other Commonwealth countries.   Take India for example.   The relationship is a bit different because India is a republic within the Commonwealth rather than a Commonwealth Realm, but it still illustrates the point.   As embarrassing as the present Prime Minister’s behaviour on his trip to India a few years ago was, the relationship between the two countries would be much worse in the unlikely event Jagmeet Singh were to become Prime Minister.   He would probably not even be allowed into India.  Eight years ago he was denied an entry visa – the first elected member of a Western legislature to be so denied – because of his connection with the movement that wishes to separate the Punjab from India and turn it into a Sikh state called Khalistan, a movement that is naturally frowned upon in India where it has been responsible for countless acts of terrorism (it has committed such acts in Canada too).   Asked about it at the time, Singh placed all the blame for any harm done to the two countries relationship on India.

Which leads me back to where this essay started.   Just as Singh could not see that his support for the movement that produced the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985 may possibly be a legitimate reason for India to ban him from their country and blamed any deterioration in the relationship between the two countries on India, so he cannot see that anything he has said or done could possibly be a reason why his party did so poorly in the last Dominion election and places the blame on the prejudices of Canadians.

If by some miracle he were to come a self-awaking and realize that instead of demanding that Canadians change in order to accommodate him that there might be something objectionable about him that he ought to be trying to fix, a logical step for him to take would be to try and emulate the last leader in his own party who truly had popular appeal.   If he were to do so, he would learn that that leader had a radically different attitude toward our country’s founding principles and fundamental institutions than his own.

The Honourable Jack Layton, the son of former Progressive Conservative MP Robert Layton, had this to say:

Some people think the NDP may want to get rid of the monarchy but I assure you that’s absolutely not the case.   My dad was a big time monarchist and so am I.

Jagmeet should try to be more like Jack.  He would be less of an ass if he did.

Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 7:50 AM

Freedom? — Canada and Canadians

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THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

The Canadian Red Ensign

FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021

THRONE, ALTAR, LIBERTY

THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

The Canadian Red Ensign

FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021

Freedom? — Canada and Canadians

Freedom? — Canada and Canadians

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.

POSTED BY GERRY T. NEAL A

Canadian Politics Controlled By Ethnic Hustlers: Jagmeet Singh And Jenny Kwan  

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Canadian Politics Controlled By Ethnic Hustlers: Jagmeet Singh And Jenny Kwan

 

by Dan Murray

NDP Jagmeet Singh and Jenny Kwan: ‘White Racists Need to understand that we Asians are the Future of Canada!’

As Canada approaches a fall Federal Election, politicians’ misunderstanding of immigration’s role in Canada becomes more and more ominous. Traditionally, Canada’s politicians believed that immigration had to serve the needs and interests of its majority population. After all, if Canada’s politicians did not look after the needs and interests of its majority population, who would?

However, as Canadians have observed over the past 30 years, Prime Ministers such as Chretien, Martin, Harper and Trudeau have refused to end Canada’s high and unnecessary immigration intake. As a result, the interests of recently-arrived immigrants such as Muslims, Sikhs, Chinese and others have taken priority over the needs and interests of Canada’s majority population. In other words, the question that most recent PM’s have dealt with is not “Should we bootlick?”, but “Can we get down to bootlick faster than our opponents?”
 All those PM’s have degraded the PM’s office and the entire country with their boot-licking. With only four years in office, Justin Trudeau has out-done all of his boot-licking predecessors. And, contrary to what Trudeau thinks, boot-licking is not something to be proud of.

As for MP’s, most people who aspire to become one have abandoned the traditional idea that immigration should serve the interests of Canada and its majority population. For example, the contrast between the nationalist immigration views of the NDP’s founder (J.S. Woodsworth) and the NDP’s recently-elected leader, Jagmeet Singh and other NDP MP’s such as Jenny Kwan is one of many examples of how disgraceful politicians’ behaviour has become.

Singh is an ethnic Sikh and Kwan is an ethnic Chinese. Their primary loyalties are to their ethnic groups, not to Canada. Their primary goal is to increase the numbers of their groups through high immigration. Kwan demonstrated that several months ago in her role as the NDP’s immigration critic when she led a charge to remove health restrictions on immigrants.

Essentially, Kwan argued that if a potential immigrant is sick, Canada should not prevent that person from entering Canada. In her view, such a practice would discriminate against sick people!! That view is one that NDP founder Woodsworth and traditional NDP’ers would have vehemently opposed.

Kwan went even further. She spoke in favour of a new law that establishes every April as Sikh Heritage Month. To most Canadians, the biggest “heritage’ that Sikhs have in Canada is the bombing of Air India, an incident that killed 329 Canadians. Why is this group, whose members are responsible for the largest mass murder in Canadian history, to be honoured? If anything, they should rot in Canada’s “Hall of Shame” forever.

Kwan may have heard Woodsworth’s name, but she definitely knows little about the traditions bequeathed by Woodsworth and the early NDP to her political party and to Canada. Woodsworth was a Canadian patriot who was very proud of Canada’s founding French and UK settlers. Woodsworth revealed his nationalist outlook about immigration in his 1909 book titled “Strangers Within Out Gates”.

‘White Supremacists have no right to complain about Chinese millionaires controlling the real estate market: get used to it, Vancouver now belongs to the Chinese!’

Like the current NDP leader and many NDP MP’s, Kwan has probably never even heard of Woodsworth’s book, let alone read it. In her most notorious statement as an elected politician , she defended Chinese Immigrant Entrepreneur tax evaders when she stated : “The Chinese are very private about their money.” When some legislators discussed a law to make Chinese millionaire immigrants pay their share of income taxes, Kwan objected :”This law (against Chinese tax evasion) goes against our culture.”

As for Singh, in his acceptance speech as the new NDP leader, he virtually declared that Canada’s two founding groups had no right to be in Canada. In his contempt for Canada’s majority population, Singh has obviously alienated NDP donors and probably tens of thousands of traditional NDP voters. In fact, Jagmeet and his clawing and grasping Sikh supporters, in their crude grab for power, may well turn the NDP into dog meat in the Fall election. Jagmeet himself could well become dog meat.

‘Nothing gives me more pride than my Sikh heritage in my country Canada…There is no place in Canada for EuroCanadian Pride!’
In his 1909 book,  Woodsworth foresees that immigrants are becoming a political force and that their interest in getting the franchise and in voting will make them a stronger force in future. He quotes American researcher Preston F. Hall on immigrants impact on the U.S. :

The heterogeneity of these races tends to promote passion, localism, and despotism, and to make impossible free co-operation for the public welfare. (P.208)

Trudeau and other politician boot-lickers should take special note of Woodsworth’s support of Preston. What Preston and Woodsworth are saying is that Diversity is not the strength of immigrant-receiving countries. In fact, it is a significant societal weakness which leads to passion (= violence), localism (= the triumph of local tribal concerns over national ones) and despotism (= an overall lack of social cohesion).

In addition, Woodsworth is saying that the lack of social cohesion can lead to the break-up of countries who currently allow extremely foolish and naive high immigration intakes.

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

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The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, June 13, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SCHADENFREUDE

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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.

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The Crazy Season of Political Purges is in Full Swing

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The Crazy Season of Political Purges is in Full Swing

 
Canada’s political parties offer voters the depressing choice of Tweedledum, Tweedledummer, Tweedledummest and Tweedlegreen on October 19. For the past month there has been a near Stalinist purge among all party ranks of any candidate who has ever bleated the slightest comment critical either of Israel or the homosexual agenda. In this, all party leaders are hardcore Cultural Marxists. The homosexual agenda is fully triumphant and the Majority marginalized and dispossessed. All three parties are hacking away at their own ranks and, in effect, conceding some ridings on election day.
 
The latest victim of the tyranny of the homosexual agenda is a Conservative candidate in Malton one Jagdish Grewal
 
The Canadian Press (October 6, 2015) reports: “The Conservatives have dumped Jagdish Grewal, a candidate in suburban Toronto who defended therapies that attempt to turn gays straight and who penned an editorial that referred to homosexuality as ‘unnatural behaviour’ and heterosexuals as ‘normal.’

‘These comments do not reflect the views of the Conservative Party of Canada. We believe that all Canadians — regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation — deserve to be treated with respect and dignity,’ the Conservative Party said in a statement. ‘Mr. Grewal is no longer an official candidate for the Conservative Party.’

Grewal, running in Mississauga-Malton, wrote an editorial in the Punjabi Post earlier this year entitled ‘Is it wrong for a homosexual to become a normal person? [A great many Canadians find homosexual practices abnormal.]

Ironically, “At a rally in the riding on Sept. 8, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper appeared on stage with Grewal and praised his work. ‘I can tell you this: through his newspaper and radio show, he urges all those who come to this country to embrace the values of freedom, democracy, of tolerance, and respect, the things that make our country such a great place to live,’ Harper told the audience.” 

But in a Canada gripped by the Maoist madness of political correctness, the price of belittling buggery is ostracism, even for a member of a usually coddled class — Third World immigrants. “Earlier, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said that Grewal’s remarks were unacceptable and called on Harper to ‘remove him. We’re saying that in this day and age, a prime minister who accepts that, continues to tolerate it and accepts the type of statement today on homosexuals is frankly not showing leadership,’ Mulcair told reporters in Surrey, B.C. ‘Mr. Harper’s got to start getting it right and it starts by firing this candidate who said those things that are totally unacceptable about gays’.” 

The hypocrisy of political correctness would gag an alligator. It’s actually alright to say outrageously offensive things about Christians as long as you say they were not REALLY what you thought. What? A psychotic moment. My mouth ran one way and my brain another? Earlier this summer, Shawn Dearn, communications director to the same canting Thomas Mulcair was revealed to have tweeted the following tolerant thoughts: “Memo to CBC and all media,” one of them reads. “Stop calling the misogynist, homophobic, child-molesting Catholic church a ‘moral authority.’ It’s not.”

However, in a tweet to his followers late Tuesday, Dearn apologized.”Some tweets that pre-dated my current role were offensive and do not reflect my views,” he said. “They are being deleted and I apologize sincerely.: (Canadian Press, September 8, 2015) All was forgiven; Mulcair did not fire his Catholic-hating mouthpiece and the campaign chugged on.

Not so lucky were two NDP candidates who had issues with Israel or extremist Jews. [Mulcair, like Prime Minister Harper is a 110 per cent Israel First. Being married to a Sephadic Jewess may have something to do with it in Mulcair’s case.]

On August 10, according to CBC News (September 16, 2015),  “Morgan Wheeldon, an NDP candidate in Nova Scotia’s Kings-Hants riding, was forced to resign after suggesting in a 2014 Facebook post that Israel was engaged in “ethnic cleansing.”

On September 24, the NDP dropped its candidate in Winnipeg . CBC (September 25, 2015) reported|: “Until Thursday night, Stefan Jonasson, a Unitarian minister, was the NDP candidate for Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley in Winnipeg. Jonasson says he was asked by his party to step down after comments he made on social media surfaced earlier this week. Now, he says he plans to leave politics for good. ‘Politics has become so taken over by muckraking, by gotcha standards, by toxic behaviour on the part of those who cover it, I think I’m done with politics.” 

Three years ago, Jonasson posted an article in 2012 accusing the Haredim, a Jewish Orthodox sect, of mistreating women. He wrote “much like the Taliban and other extremists, the Haredim offer a toxic caricature of faith at odds with the spirit of the religious tradition they profess to represent.”

Jonasson tells As It Happens guest host Laura Lynch that “people are increasingly using the term ‘Taliban’ to refer to religious extremists of all kinds.” And although he defends his comparison of the Haredim to the Taliban, he says he wishes he hadn’t used those words. 

‘It wasn’t my intention to cause gratuitous offence. I was trying to call attention to the fact that women are not being treated equitably by some religious extremists’.”

Understandably disappointed at the intolerance of the NDP, Rev. Jonasson told the National Post (September 25, 2015): “I wish the party had had the courage and the foresight to believe that my candidacy was worth defending, but they did not.”

On August 24, the Tories dropped candidate Gilles Guibord, candidate in Rosemont-la-Petite-Prairie,  for his traditionalist views on Indians and men/.women relationships. His offending comments were: “First Nations refused to integrate into European culture. It’s their right, but there was a price to pay for that decision: Rejecting urban society and its advantages. The federal government used corruption to keep First Nations quieter… Political parties didn’t take responsibility for integrating aboriginal communities…”

“Before treating our ancestors as thieves, we have to at least not betray history. In Quebec, it’s the descendents of the French who have ancestral rights [to land], not the Mohawks. The Supreme Court still does not understand that.”

“To be fair, I think it’s better to speak of men’s authority over women, than of superiority. I think that male-female relations were not determined by religion, but rather by forces present before religions [existed]. Man was stronger than woman, the woman was placed under his protection. Because of pregnancies, women were often in a state of fragility or insecurity, so men protected them, etc.” (CBC August 24, 2105)

And the purges extended to the Liberal Party as well. Maria Manna who had posted some views expressing skepticism of the official version of 9/11 was dropped as a candidate in late September. “A Liberal candidate who expressed skepticism about the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. has resigned as the candidate in the B.C. riding of Cowichan-Malahat-Langford, CBC News has learned. Maria Manna had posted comments on her Facebook page that questioned the official account of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, calling it “the lie.” On Friday, she defended the comments, made in 2010 and 2013, saying they were her “truth” at the time.” (CBC, September 28, 2015) Truth then, but not now? If she’s changed her mind, why not just say so?

A couple of days later, the Liberals turfed out another candidate in British Columbia: “Cheryl Thomas, a Liberal Party candidate for Victoria, B.C., has resigned because of past comments she made on Facebook about the Muslim and Jewish communities.’I want to take this moment to apologize unreservedly for past comments on social media that have come to light,’ wrote Thomas on her website. Referring to mosques as “brainwashing stations. Saying “the oppressed of the Warsaw ghettos and the concentration camps have become the oppressors.” She knows she’s “sinned” by saying anything critical of privileged minorities, but despite her contrition still must go|: “When looking back at them, I understand that they are offensive and have no place in our political discourse.” (CBC, September 30, 2015) Pathetic!
 
Seemingly, the only acceptable candidates are complete ciphers who haven’t a brain or idea in their heads and who will be able to parrot the party line, whatever it is, on cue and, otherwise, just shut up.
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Jagdish Grewal out: Tories dump candidate for calling homosexuality “unnatural”