Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
Thursday, October 22, 2026
John Bull McGregor Fires a Warning Shot
In my 29 January essay, The Canadian Right Needs to Reclaim its Roots and Stop Looking Southward for Inspiration, I said this of the Alberta separatists:
All that I have to say about this group in particular is that while they claim to speak for all of their province, I have too high a regard for the province named after Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter than to believe it to be entirely populated by inbred, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, ass-tards as would have to be the case for these to be their legitimate spokesmen.
The results of the Alberta referendum on Monday have, I believe, proved my judgement to be sound on this point. There were ten questions, the relevant one being the tenth, which read:
Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?
In the end, Alberta voted overwhelmingly to remain in the Dominion, with a little over three-quarters voting to remain and a little under a quarter voting for pursuing the path of separation.
The referendum and the separatists calling for it had been heavily promoted by the neo-conservative media. The same people who, rightly, have decried the war which progressives have been waging against the memory and legacy of, among others, our first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, have been the loudest cheerleaders of a movement aimed at undoing that legacy, defeating the Confederation Project that Macdonald spearheaded, and breaking up the Dominion he and the other Fathers of Confederation fought so hard to build. Canadian neo-conservatives are in no danger of succumbing to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hobgoblin, with or without the oft-dropped “foolish”.
It was with much amusement that I read the headline of the article by Clayton DeMaine reporting the results on Juno News, the neo-conservative e-zine on Substack founded and edited by Candice Malcom and Keeane Bexte. The headline read “Nearly 1 in 4 Albertans Vote Against Staying in Canada.” Bravo. If there is an agency somewhere that hands out awards for spinning your side’s loss as a win, this surely deserves at least a nomination.
When I refer to such people as neo-conservatives, note that I am using the word in its Canadian sense. The American sense of the word is more familiar. In the United States the term neo-conservative refers to the most hawkish element of the Republican Party, those who believe in a Pax Americana in which the United States is the world’s policeman, perpetually toppling regimes that they supported up to yesterday, in order to keep the world safe for democracy, capitalism, and Israel, not necessarily in that order. In Canada, neo-conservative refers to those who say they are conservatives, small or big c, but give to this term its contemporary American meaning rather than its traditional Canadian meaning. As a further point of clarification, it is Canadian neo-conservatives of the small-c variety, especially the alternative media and social media types, rather than those of the big-C variety (i.e. the Conservative Party, its members and supporters) who have been cheering on the Alberta separatist movement.
Traditional Canadian conservatism is the more legitimate type. The United States was built on the foundation of classical (Lockean) liberalism and its two parties are not the equivalent of the Canadian Conservative and Liberal parties. If there is any direct correspondence between American and Canadian parties it is between the American Republican party and the Canadian Liberal party, both of which are descended from seventeenth century Whiggery. The United States neither had nor wanted a “conservatism” at the national level until the middle of the twentieth century.
Canada was founded on her older, more traditional and more legitimate, conservatism. The original English Canadians were the Loyalists who opposed the American Revolution. Their conservatism was that of Great Britain, modified by the acceptance of some early Modern innovations but still recognizably descended from the seventeenth century Toryism that opposed the Puritan Whiggery that was the ancestor of classical liberalism and the American, French and eventually Bolshevik Revolutions. French Canada, which having been ceded to the British Crown shortly before the American Revolution and thereby avoided going through the French Revolution that followed on its heels, was less Modern and more traditional than English Canada prior to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. When the two worked together in Confederation in the 1860s to form the Dominion of Canada, it was in order to build a country that did not throw away her past in revolution, that adapted the time-tested institutions of parliamentary government under a reigning royal monarchy that she inherited to her situation rather than inventing new ones, and that tried to hold on to the older idea that there are virtues higher than those of commerce and industry and that it is the pursuit of these rather than the other that is the foundation of civilization.
It will come as no surprise to long-time readers that I have no sympathies whatsoever with Canadian neo-conservatism no matter how often their views on such-and-such a particular issue may happen to line up with my own. My long time wish for my country, Canada, is a restoration based on the principles of Confederation in 1867, and for Canadian conservatism that it would remember and recover its roots, preferably bringing into itself more of the Toryism from which it is descended. These are moves in the opposite direction to that the neo-conservatives desire. David Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a neo-conservative is a conservative who has also lost his memory. As someone who both by instinct and by application of the principles of orthodox Christianity is a royalist and monarchist rather than a worshiper of the Modern idol of liberal democracy, I call myself a Tory rather than a conservative and am also quite comfortable with the self-application of the term reactionary. As someone who calls himself a patriot rather than a nationalist and knows that true patriotism is a natural love of country akin to love for one’s family rather than the internal compulsion to see one’s country through the eyes of an ideal of “greatness” I see no reason why the stupid things that the Liberals have done while in power should lessen my love of Canada. I naturally, therefore, have no sympathies with those who are incapable of criticizing the Liberals without turning it into an opportunity to condemn our country in the process and who wish to throw away our country’s older, better, more authentic conservatism for the latest model of the American conservatism that is less than a century old and whose roots run no deeper than Modern liberalism. Especially when they wish to do so at this moment in history when American conservatism has been captured from within by a movement, MAGA, which has betrayed the promise and potential it showed at its start about a decade and a half ago and rapidly become a cult that idolatrously worships its thuggish leader even as he degenerates into more and more of a caricature of what his enemies have thought him to be all along on a daily basis.
Had the Canadian neo-conservatives been more interested in our country’s own traditional Tory conservatism they might have been familiar with Stephen Leacock who in 1937 published a book entitled My Discovery of the West. In this Governor General’s Award winning book, an account of a lecture tour he had given in western Canada after his retirement from McGill University the previous year, he wrote the following:
It used to be said that the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian. It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor. His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won’t miss what he shoots at.
Had they read this with any degree of comprehension they might not have been so quick to pin their hopes of undoing Confederation, tearing Canada apart, and fulfilling the nineteenth century American dream of Manifest Destiny on a separatist referendum in Alberta.
God Save the King!
Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 6:40 AM
Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
Thursday, October 22, 2026
John Bull McGregor Fires a Warning Shot
In my 29 January essay, The Canadian Right Needs to Reclaim its Roots and Stop Looking Southward for Inspiration, I said this of the Alberta separatists:
All that I have to say about this group in particular is that while they claim to speak for all of their province, I have too high a regard for the province named after Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter than to believe it to be entirely populated by inbred, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, ass-tards as would have to be the case for these to be their legitimate spokesmen.
The results of the Alberta referendum on Monday have, I believe, proved my judgement to be sound on this point. There were ten questions, the relevant one being the tenth, which read:
Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?
In the end, Alberta voted overwhelmingly to remain in the Dominion, with a little over three-quarters voting to remain and a little under a quarter voting for pursuing the path of separation.
The referendum and the separatists calling for it had been heavily promoted by the neo-conservative media. The same people who, rightly, have decried the war which progressives have been waging against the memory and legacy of, among others, our first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, have been the loudest cheerleaders of a movement aimed at undoing that legacy, defeating the Confederation Project that Macdonald spearheaded, and breaking up the Dominion he and the other Fathers of Confederation fought so hard to build. Canadian neo-conservatives are in no danger of succumbing to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hobgoblin, with or without the oft-dropped “foolish”.
It was with much amusement that I read the headline of the article by Clayton DeMaine reporting the results on Juno News, the neo-conservative e-zine on Substack founded and edited by Candice Malcom and Keeane Bexte. The headline read “Nearly 1 in 4 Albertans Vote Against Staying in Canada.” Bravo. If there is an agency somewhere that hands out awards for spinning your side’s loss as a win, this surely deserves at least a nomination.
When I refer to such people as neo-conservatives, note that I am using the word in its Canadian sense. The American sense of the word is more familiar. In the United States the term neo-conservative refers to the most hawkish element of the Republican Party, those who believe in a Pax Americana in which the United States is the world’s policeman, perpetually toppling regimes that they supported up to yesterday, in order to keep the world safe for democracy, capitalism, and Israel, not necessarily in that order. In Canada, neo-conservative refers to those who say they are conservatives, small or big c, but give to this term its contemporary American meaning rather than its traditional Canadian meaning. As a further point of clarification, it is Canadian neo-conservatives of the small-c variety, especially the alternative media and social media types, rather than those of the big-C variety (i.e. the Conservative Party, its members and supporters) who have been cheering on the Alberta separatist movement.
Traditional Canadian conservatism is the more legitimate type. The United States was built on the foundation of classical (Lockean) liberalism and its two parties are not the equivalent of the Canadian Conservative and Liberal parties. If there is any direct correspondence between American and Canadian parties it is between the American Republican party and the Canadian Liberal party, both of which are descended from seventeenth century Whiggery. The United States neither had nor wanted a “conservatism” at the national level until the middle of the twentieth century.
Canada was founded on her older, more traditional and more legitimate, conservatism. The original English Canadians were the Loyalists who opposed the American Revolution. Their conservatism was that of Great Britain, modified by the acceptance of some early Modern innovations but still recognizably descended from the seventeenth century Toryism that opposed the Puritan Whiggery that was the ancestor of classical liberalism and the American, French and eventually Bolshevik Revolutions. French Canada, which having been ceded to the British Crown shortly before the American Revolution and thereby avoided going through the French Revolution that followed on its heels, was less Modern and more traditional than English Canada prior to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. When the two worked together in Confederation in the 1860s to form the Dominion of Canada, it was in order to build a country that did not throw away her past in revolution, that adapted the time-tested institutions of parliamentary government under a reigning royal monarchy that she inherited to her situation rather than inventing new ones, and that tried to hold on to the older idea that there are virtues higher than those of commerce and industry and that it is the pursuit of these rather than the other that is the foundation of civilization.
It will come as no surprise to long-time readers that I have no sympathies whatsoever with Canadian neo-conservatism no matter how often their views on such-and-such a particular issue may happen to line up with my own. My long time wish for my country, Canada, is a restoration based on the principles of Confederation in 1867, and for Canadian conservatism that it would remember and recover its roots, preferably bringing into itself more of the Toryism from which it is descended. These are moves in the opposite direction to that the neo-conservatives desire. David Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a neo-conservative is a conservative who has also lost his memory. As someone who both by instinct and by application of the principles of orthodox Christianity is a royalist and monarchist rather than a worshipper of the Modern idol of liberal democracy, I call myself a Tory rather than a conservative and am also quite comfortable with the self-application of the term reactionary. As someone who calls himself a patriot rather than a nationalist and knows that true patriotism is a natural love of country akin to love for one’s family rather than the internal compulsion to see one’s country through the eyes of an ideal of “greatness” I see no reason why the stupid things that the Liberals have done while in power should lessen my love of Canada. I naturally, therefore, have no sympathies with those who are incapable of criticizing the Liberals without turning it into an opportunity to condemn our country in the process and who wish to throw away our country’s older, better, more authentic conservatism for the latest model of the American conservatism that is less than a century old and whose roots run no deeper than Modern liberalism. Especially when they wish to do so at this moment in history when American conservatism has been captured from within by a movement, MAGA, which has betrayed the promise and potential it showed at its start about a decade and a half ago and rapidly become a cult that idolatrously worships its thuggish leader even as he degenerates into more and more of a caricature of what his enemies have thought him to be all along on a daily basis.
Had the Canadian neo-conservatives been more interested in our country’s own traditional Tory conservatism they might have been familiar with Stephen Leacock who in 1937 published a book entitled My Discovery of the West. In this Governor General’s Award winning book, an account of a lecture tour he had given in western Canada after his retirement from McGill University the previous year, he wrote the following:
It used to be said that the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian. It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor. His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won’t miss what he shoots at.
Had they read this with any degree of comprehension they might not have been so quick to pin their hopes of undoing Confederation, tearing Canada apart, and fulfilling the nineteenth century American dream of Manifest Destiny on a separatist referendum in Alberta.
God Save the King!
Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 6:40 AM
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