Tag Archives: David Warren

John Bull McGregor Fires a Warning Shot

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The Canadian Red Ensign

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

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Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

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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Dead Souls

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, February 14, 2025

Dead Souls

The second of February is the fortieth day after Christmas and therefore the day on which the Church commemorates the Presentation of Jesus Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  This commemoration is popularly known as Candlemas from the tradition of blessing candles in Church on this day.  There is an ancient folk tradition that says that if it is a clear day on Candlemas it will be a long winter.  A tradition derived from this one says that a hibernating animal – which depends on where you live – will temporarily awaken on Candlemas to predict the remaining length of winter by whether or not he sees his shadow.  In North America, the hibernating animal is the groundhog or woodchuck.

This year Candlemas fell on a Sunday.  On most Sunday evenings a friend comes over to watch movies and the obvious choice was “Groundhog Day” the 1993 film by Harold Ramis in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who goes to Punxsutawney, the small community in Pennsylvania where Groundhog Day is a much bigger deal than elsewhere, and becomes trapped in a personal time loop that forces him to relive the day over and over again.  The way in which Phil, Murray’s character who shares a name with the famous groundhog, responds to this dilemma evolves over the course of the movie.  At one point, fairly early in the plot, his response is gross self-indulgence since there are no consequences due to the slate constantly being wiped clean.  In this phase, the character of Rita portrayed by Andie MacDowell, watching him engage in reckless gluttony in the local diner, quotes Sir Walter Scott to him:

The wretch, concentered all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he’s sprung

Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

In the movie, Phil’s response is to laugh and make a joke about having misheard Walter Scott as Willard Scott.  Watching the movie with my friend, my response was to point out that Rita had misapplied the lines she quoted.  The lines are from Canto VI of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and refer not to a hedonist but to the person lacking patriotism.  The first part of the Canto goes:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;—
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

After this comes the lines quoted in the movie.


Clearly Sir Walter Scott shared the opinion of Scottish-American, neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre that patriotism is a virtue as well he ought for that opinion is correct.  Note, however, that the correctness of the opinion depends on the definition of patriotism.  Nationalism, which is frequently confused with patriotism, is not a virtue.  It is not the opposite of a virtue, a vice, either, but this is only because it does not belong to the same general category, the habits of behaviour that make up character, of which virtue and vice are the good and bad subcategories.  Nationalism is an ideology.  An ideology is a formulaic substitute for a living tradition of thought (see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics And Other Essays).  Shortcuts of this type are always bad. 

In a recent column Brian Lilley spoke of “national pride” and criticized those who have only recently started to display national pride as Canadians in response to Donald the Orange.   While Lilley’s argument is related to my main topic in this essay, I bring it up here to make the point that “national pride” is not a good way of describing the patriotism that is a virtue.  To be fair, Lilley did not equate patriotism with “national pride” but this is because the word patriotism does not appear in his column.  Pride appears four times and the adjective proud appears nine times.  While it is easy to see why Lilley would use these terms, since much of the column is appropriately critical of the attacks on Canada and her history, identity, and traditions that have been coming from the current Liberal government for the duration of the near-decade they have been in power, pride is not the right word.  It is the name of a vice, indeed, the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, rather than a virtue.

Fortunately, we do not have to look far and wide to find the right term.  Patriotism, correctly defined, is neither the ideology of nationalism that values one’s country for its perceived superiority to all others requiring that all others be insulted and subjugated nor the deadly sin of pride as directed towards one’s country, but simply love of one’s country. 

Love of one’s country is indeed a virtue.  Whereas pride is the worst of all sins, love is the highest of all virtues. Of course, the love that is the highest of all virtues is a specific kind of love.  The Seven Heavenly Virtues include the Four Cardinal Virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude and the Three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Love.  The Cardinal Virtues are habits that anyone can cultivate and so make up the best moral character that man can attain in his natural or unregenerate state.  While faith, hope, and love in a more general sense can be similarly cultivated, the Faith, Hope, and Love that make up the essence of Christian character must be imparted by the grace of God although the Christian is also expected to cultivate them.  Love is the greatest of the three as St. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 13:13, and therefore as Henry Drummond called it, “the greatest thing in the world”.  It incorporates the other two since they are built upon each other.  Natural loves are lesser than Christian Love or Charity, but they are still virtuous insomuch as they resemble, albeit imperfectly, the Theological Virtue.  Patriotism, the love of country, is such a love.  Edmund Burke famously described how it develops “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle … of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind.”  The “little platoons” include one’s family and local community and is Burke had wanted to belabour the point he could have said that the first principle is love of one’s family, which develops into love of one’s local community, and then outward.

It has been heartwarming to see Canadians display their love of country over the last month or so in response to the repeated threats of Anschluss coming from America’s Fuhrer.  While not all of these displays have been in good taste they do all demonstrate that Captain Airhead’s efforts to kill Canadian patriotism by endlessly apologizing for past events that need no apologies, cancelling Canada’s founders and historical leaders such as Sir John A. Macdonald, and other such nonsense have failed.  This resurgence in Canadian public patriotism ought, therefore, to be welcomed by the “conservatives” who rightly despise Captain Airhead.  Oddly, however, it has not been so welcomed by many of them. 

In part this is due to the fact that Captain Airhead, the Liberals, the NDP, and their media supporters who were all on the “cancel Canada” bandwagon until yesterday are now wrapping themselves in the flag and these do deserve to be called out for this.  The right way to do so, however, is to say something to the effect of “you are rather late to the party, but thanks for showing up.”  To Brian Lilley’s credit, that is the gist of what he says in the column alluded to earlier.  Many other “conservatives”, however, have responded quite differently.  In his 2006 book, In Defence of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue, Jeremy Lott pointed out the difference between Jesus’ condemnation of hypocrisy and Modern condemnation of hypocrisy.  In condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, Jesus did not condemn them for the high moral standards they taught, but for falling short of those standards by sinning.  Moderns, however, when they condemn hypocrisy, condemn the moral standards rather than the sin.  The response of many “conservatives” to the newly discovered Canadian patriotism of progressives resembles this in that they seem to be criticizing the progressives more for their expression of patriotism today than for their lack of it yesterday.  One even quoted Samuel Johnson’s “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”  I refer him to the comments of James Boswell, whose record of the remark is the reason we are familiar with it today, as to what it means.  Dr. Johnson was not impugning love of country, but a kind of pseudo-patriotism which interestingly enough was associated with the founding of America.

It can hardly be a coincidence that these same “conservatives” have been rather less than patriotic in their response to the threats from south of the border.  The founder of one “conservative” independent online media company first responded to these threats by saying they should be treated as a joke and a funny one at that. Then, when Donald the Orange said last weekend that it was no joke,  she flip-flopped and criticized Captain Airhead for having initially done exactly that and said the Anschluss threat was a joke.  In between she conducted and published an interview with an immigrant from America who twelve years ago proved herself to be exactly the kind of immigrant we don’t need when she published a book proposing the merger of our country with her country of birth. 

The general response to these threats in this organization’s commentary has been to treat the American dictator as a reasonable man, with legitimate grievances, who can be negotiated with and to propose an economic merger between the two countries that falls short of a political merger.  Ironically, their website is promoting a children’s book they just published on the life of Sir John A. Macdonald intended to counter the negative propaganda about the Father of Confederation that progressives have been spewing based on their skewed narrative about the Indian Residential Schools.  The book was a good and patriotic response to this blood libel of our country.  Sir John must be spinning in his grave, however, at the thought that the defence of his memory could be merged with the idea of an economic union with the United States.  Sir John spent his entire career as Prime Minister promoting internal east-west trade within the Dominion and fighting the siren call of north-south trade because he knew that this was the greatest threat to the success of the Confederation Project.

Free trade is a good idea from an economic perspective, but each of the “free trade” agreements we have signed with the United States has been a terrible idea from a political perspective.  The kind of economic union these “conservatives” are promoting would be worse than all of the other “free trade” agreements, since the United State is currently led by a lawless megalomaniac, who respects neither the limits placed on his powers by his country’s constitution nor the agreements he has signed and cannot be trusted to keep his own word – the “free trade” agreement he is currently, and deceitfully, claiming is so “unfair” to his country is the one he himself negotiated – and who looks at tariffs and economic measures in general as weapons to accomplish what his predecessors accomplished by bullets and bombs.  By his predecessors I do not mean previous American presidents, but Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.  I recognized that this was what we were dealing with the moment he made his first “51st state” remark and was confirmed in this when he doubled down on this talk after Captain Airhead announced his intention to resign.  No Canadian patriot could fail to recognize it today after he has continued to escalate his lies and rhetoric and threats for the last month.   Yes, the Left’s endless likeness of everyone they don’t like to Hitler has desensitized us to these comparisons, but let us not be like the villagers in Aesop’s story about the boy who cried wolf.  This time the wolf is real. The sort of things the Left objects to in Donald the Orange, his immigration policies, his termination of the racist, anti-white, policy of DEI, do not warrant a comparison with Hitler, but his threatening us with Anschluss, his demand for Lebensraum from Denmark, his intent to take back his “Danzig Corridor” from Panama, his finding his Sudetenland in Gaza, most certainly do, as does the insane personality cult his followers have developed into.

Canadian conservatives ought to be leading the renaissance of Canadian patriotism, and yes, Brian Lilley, you are right that it should not have taken something like Trump’s threats to bring that renaissance about.  Liberals have always been the party of Americanization in Canada.  Sadly, today’s conservatives are mostly neoconservatives.  David Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a neoconservative is a conservative who has lost his memory.  On the authority of Sir Walter Scott I deduce from the disgusting anti-patriotism I have seen recently that many have lost their souls as well. — Gerry T. Neal

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Dominion Day Dolour

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Gerry T. Neal

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Dominion Day Dolour

It has been my custom for Dominion Day over the last few years, to write either sketches about specific individuals who exemplified the Canada of Confederation and her traditions or jeremiads lamenting the present state of the Dominion. I had not realized, until I checked the last six years, that this has followed an alternating pattern, in which this would be a year for a jeremiad. This suits me as the next individual I had on deck for a sketch was the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton, and while I read Donald Wright’s biography of him as recently as last year – I much prefer the chapter on him in Charles Taylor’s Radical Tories, since Wright’s political correctness infuriates me as much as it would have his subject – I would need more time than I had available to re-read Creighton’s own books in order to do him justice. So a jeremiad it is.

There is plenty for someone from my point of view to lament. There have been two traditions of thought that have borne the rather inaccurate label “conservative” in Canada. There is the old Tory tradition of Loyalism and royalism, which is monarchist rather than republican, holds the Westminster system of Parliament to be the best form of government ever to evolve on the face of the earth, dissents from the narrative of the rebellion of 1776 and is suspicious of the United States, utterly rejects socialism without fully embracing capitalism, and is socially, morally, and culturally traditionalist. Then there is neo-conservatism, which is very pro-American, holds to the basic political and economic views of nineteenth century liberalism, and regards anything from outside eighteenth to nineteenth century liberalism which has been traditionally associated with conservatism as dispensable. While the extent to which the official Conservative Party has ever really stood for either of these traditions is questionable, it was associated with the first until 1967 and the latter from about 1983 on, especially after the merger with what began as the Reform Party. I have belonged to the first tradition from the moment political thoughts first formed in my head, and am very much a representative of its right wing. Most other surviving members – David Warren is a very notable exception –speak for its left wing. In other words, I speak for a point of view, which the Liberal Party, egged on by the further left parties, and aided and abetted by the Conservatives, has striven to make as unwelcome as possible in Canada.

Earlier this year, our provincial governments, with the full backing and support of Ottawa, essentially eliminated what was left of our most basic freedoms. These freedoms are part of the Common Law tradition which we inherited when we became the Dominion of Canada on this date in 1867. They are not something which Pierre Trudeau gave us in 1982, despite the fact that our lying schoolteachers and our lying newsmedia commentators, most of whom sold their souls to the Liberal Party and its true leader in hell at the beginning of their careers, have been instilling that impression among the younger generations ever since that year. Although the Charter did not give us those freedoms, it does name four of them in its second section. The freedom of conscience and religion is the first named. The third and fourth named are freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association. There is no freedom of conscience and religion when the provincial government forbids us from going to Church for four months. There is no freedom of peaceful assembly when the same government tells us we cannot gather in groups larger than five or ten or whatever number. There is no freedom of association if the government tells us we must be six feet apart from each other in public at all times. The provincial governments got away with this totalitarian power grab with the help of a media-generated panic over the spread of a virus with a low fatality rate that produces mild to no symptoms in the vast majority of those who contract it, information which has been available all along to anybody willing to check out the facts.

In the meantime, the Liberal Party which was reduced to a minority government in last year’s Dominion election, took full advantage of this situation to seek, in an underhanded attack on the Magna Carta and the foundational principles of Parliament, unlimited tax and spend powers, and to prevent Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition from doing their job of holding the government accountable in Parliament.

Then, about a month ago, when Marxist organizations in the United States found a pretext for launching a race war against white people, the Prime Minister, despite his own hands being far from clean when it comes to matters concerning race as we discovered in the election campaign last year, jumped on board the bandwagon. Even though the public health restrictions at whatever stage of easing they were at from province to province remained in effect for everybody else, they were lifted completely for the anti-white hate rallies that were organized in Canada’s major cities. The Prime Minister, who has never given the slightest indication of sincere contrition over his many personal failings, but who is always ready to give an apology on behalf of the entire country to whatever designated victim group happens to feel the most offended at any given moment, showed up for a photo op of himself “taking the knee” in a gesture of false humility at the rally in Ottawa. A few days later on his syndicated morning television show he berated our country over its supposed “systemic racism.” This was the cue for everyone else to ritually acknowledge this systemic racism, whether they understood the concept or, more likely, did not, and for the “woke” to start “cancelling” anybody who failed to participate in this now mandatory ritual.

This requirement that everybody accept this ridiculous narrative, taken from the neo-Marxist Critical Theory, is, of course, an assault on yet another of our basic freedoms. As with the others, this too is a freedom from the Common Law tradition which is named in the second section of the Charter, where it is called the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.” If all Canadians are now required to confess the neo-Marxist narrative that our country is systemically racist, upon threat of being cancelled if we dissent, then it is a joke to say that we have freedom of thought, belief, opinion or expression. If the Crown broadcaster and all of the other news stations and newspapers that have been subsidized by this government are pushing this same narrative, while the government has been applying pressure to big tech social media companies to censor dissent, then there is no “freedom of the press and other media of communication.” The assault on this basic freedom has been going on since the premiership of the first Trudeau. It has been carried out in the name of combatting prejudice and promoting diversity, even though the most essential kind of diversity for a free country is the diversity of thought that is under attack.

All of Western Civilization is now threatened by these neo-Maoists who wish to raze history to the ground and bring us to Year Zero. They have the support of most of the mainstream media, the corporate world, academia, celebrities and a wide assortment of elected officials, civil servants and even the police forces they wish to see “defunded”. In Canada, they have demanded that the prestigious McGill University disown its founder and namesake. Worse, they are demanding that our country disavow the leading Father of Confederation and our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Hilariously, they managed to get a newspaper or two to put trigger-warning labels on the flag. The reason this is so funny is because the flag in question is not the traditional, historical, flag of Canada, the Red Ensign, but rather the bland Maple Leaf which the Communist traitor, Lester Pearson chose to replace it with in 1965 precisely because it said nothing about Canada’s history, heritage, and legacy. Indeed, the Liberal Party’s assault on the traditional symbols of the Canada of Confederation during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, starting with the old flag and ending with Dominion Day, could pretty much be said to have been the first wave to which the present wave of neo-Maoist, Year Zeroism is the second.

The Liberal Party rejected our country’s traditional symbols and was determined to replace them with ones bearing its own stamp. Today’s neo-Maoists demand a wholesale repudiation of our country’s founding and history. Symbols and history are important. Almost a century ago, the Mackenzie King Liberals attacked the Crown’s legitimate and necessary right to refuse an improper dissolution request (see Eugene Forsey, The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament, 1943). This undermined Parliament’s right to hold the Prime Minister accountable and set the stage for Prime Ministerial dictatorship (see John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, 1957). This year, we have seen the largest assault on Parliamentary prerogative since then, and on the part of a minority Liberal government to boot, while all the provincial governments ran roughshod over our most basic Common Law rights and freedoms. If we had valued our traditional symbols and our history more, we would not have so willingly acquiesced in this.

While I weep for my country, I wish you all a Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!
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