Tag Archives: Eugene Forsey

The Dominion of Canada – An Annotated Bibliography

Posted on by

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Monday, July 1, 2024

The Dominion of Canada – An Annotated Bibliography

Today is the 157th anniversary of the day when the British North America Act came into effect establishing a new realm in North America that under the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria and governed by her own Parliament in Ottawa would bear the title of Dominion and the name of Canada.  Originally a confederation of four provinces she would grow to include six others along with the territories which were originally a single territory, which was divided twice, just before the twentieth century and at that century’s end bringing the current number to three.  Although I was only six when the Liberals, lacking the necessary quorum in Parliament, sneakily and illegally passed a bill changing the name of our country’s holiday I still refer to it as Dominion Day which the great Robertson Davies, writing to the Globe and Mail, once described as a “splendid title” while referring to the new one as “wet” due to its being one letter off Canada Dry, and the folly of the Liberal parliamentarians as “one of the inexplicable lunacies of a democratic system temporarily running to seed.”

Normally for Dominion Day I write an essay, sometimes about a notable Canada, sometimes a more political piece blasting the Liberals, big and small l, and all the changes for the worse that they have wrought.  Last year’s essay was a call for religious revival in Canada.  This year I decided to do something a bit different and have put together a Dominion Day recommended reading list.  This list is not intended to be exhaustive either in whole or in any of the sections into which it is divided so non-inclusion in this list should not be taken as a recommendation against a book on my part.  

Canada: Political Philosophy

The two books that top my list of recommendations for Canadian political reading are ones to which long-time readers will have seen me make multiple mentions.  These are John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure: A Selection of Speeches on Freedom and Defence of Our Parliamentary Heritage (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972).  The first of these, which was published posthumously having been edited by journalist Judith Robinson who herself passed away not that long after, makes the case for our constitutional parliamentary monarchy against the alternatives of American capitalist republicanism or Soviet socialist totalitarianism which at the time were striving to remake the entire world, each in her own image, in the conflict we remember as the Cold War.  Farthing also discusses the first stage of the Liberal Party’s subversion of our constitution in the King-Byng affair.  A more thorough examination and defense of the constitutional principles represented by the right side of that almost century old controversy, that of Lord Byng (the King in the name of the affair was not King George V, whom Byng represented as Governor-General, but the Liberal Prime Minister whose last name was King) can be found in Eugene Forsey’s doctoral dissertation which was published as The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1943).  I mention this third book, which in its dissertation form can be found online if you have any difficulty locating a hard copy, before commenting on Diefenbaker’s because of its topical connection with Farthing’s. Diefenbaker’s book collects speeches that he gave during and in response to the second wave of Liberal subversion.  It is mostly changes wrought early in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau that are decried although the second wave of Liberal subversion can be dated to the moment that Lester Pearson, with the aid of both the Social Credit and the New Democrats, ousted Diefenbaker in 1963.  For the classic account of this act of Liberal subversion see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1965) which is the most political of Grant’s books, although it incorporates the philosophical and moral insights more typical of his other writings.

The fifth book that deserves mention under this heading is The Social Criticism Of Stephen Leacock: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1973) which was edited by Alan Bowker and which incorporates the whole of Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, originally published in 1920 and which is a critique rather than an endorsement of socialism, as well as “Greater Canada: An Appeal” and several of the essays from Leacock’s Essays and Literary Studies (1916), including his “The Woman Question” which is the best single piece ever written by a Canadian on the subject of feminism. Leacock was the chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill where he was a mentor to both Farthing and Forsey.  Noting this connection brings me to the sixth book, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1982).  The author of this book was Charles Taylor, not the philosopher but the journalist and race horse breeder. Eugene Forsey and George Grant both get a chapter in this book, the chapters being based on  Taylor’s personal interviews with these men, which is the same format used for the chapters on the historians Donald Creighton and William Morton and a few others.  Leacock and Farthing obviously could not be similarly interviewed although Taylor discussed Leacock and mentioned Farthing earlier in the book.

Canada: Topical Politics

The distinction between the books under the previous heading and the books under this one is that the previous books addressed Canadian politics in terms of general political philosophy whereas these address specific issues.  The Stephen Leacock book could have gone in either section.

On the subject of immigration, which is a very hot button topic today, Doug Collins’ Immigration: the Destruction of English Canada (Richmond Hill: BMG, 1979) is arguably still the best Canadian book ever written.  It was the eighth and last book published by BMG, a small publishing house set up by Winnett Boyd, Kenneth McDonald and Orville Gaines to warn against the path down which Pierre Trudeau was leading Canada. This was very early in the era of liberal immigration and Collins accurately predicted that the end result would be the importation of a lot of unnecessary and unwanted racial strife.  For warning against importing racial strife Collins was branded a racist.  Since that warning went unheeded, he was a Cassandra and his enemies did their worst to make him a pariah by the time he passed away in 2001.  More of his commentary on immigration and a host of other issues can be found in The Best and Worst of Doug Collins (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1987).  When this book was first published you could walk into an ordinary bookstore and buy it off the shelf.  When he died in 2001, the only obituaries I remember seeing were by Kevin Michael Grace in the Report and by Allan Fotheringham in MacLeans (I was never a fan of Foth but he showed a lot of class on this occasion).  The next book on my list on this topic is Ricardo Duchesne’s Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (London: Black House Publishing, 2017).  Of all recent books on Canadian immigration this is the closest to Collins’ in terms of what it is for and what it is against although it tackles the subject from an academic rather than a journalistic angle – Duchesne is a historical sociologist who until he was driven out by leftist colleagues a few years back was a professor in the social science department of the University of New Brunswick – and has the advantage of almost four more decades of history on which to comment.  Other books deserving mention are Charles M. Campbell’s Betrayal & Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration (West Vancouver: Jasmine Books, 2000) and Mike Taylor’s The Truth About Immigration: Exposing the Economic and Humanitarian Myths (Coquitlam: KARMA Publishing, 1998).  These could be described as having been written from an insider’s perspective.  Campbell, an engineer in the mining industry by profession, served ten years on the old Immigration Appeal Board that existed before it was reorganized into the Immigration and Refugee Appeal Board in 1989 following the Supreme Court’s bad ruling in the Singh case in 1985.  Taylor had worked as an immigration investigator for the federal government before writing his book.

The current Liberal government that has taken rather the opposite view of immigration to that expressed in the books just mentioned has promoted a lot of hatred against Canada or at least the historical Canada.  They have also promoted a lot of ethno-masochism among Canadians of European ancestry.  I am not saying that these problems began with the present government, far from it, but they have been more aggressively promoted by this government than any prior and the means employed has been a narrative in which the history of the church-administered boarding schools that Canada used to fulfil her education obligations under the Indian treaties has been heavily distorted.   In response I will recommend two books both of which are edited collections by multiple authors.   The first is Rodney A. Clifton and Mark DeWolf ed. From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Report (Winnipeg: The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2021) and the second is C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan ed. Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools) (Dorchester Books and True North Media, 2023).

Since my recommendations in the previous two paragraphs will have already driven any overly sensitive progressive into a fuming frenzy I will stoke the fire of their rage further by adding Down The Drain? A Critical Re-Examination of Canadian Foreign Aid, written by Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform co-founders Paul Fromm and James P. Hull and published in Toronto by Griffin House in 1981.  This is the best Canadian book that I have read on the subject of tax money being taken from working and middle class Canadians and either dumped into the bank accounts of Third World dictators or thrown away on wasteful projects in the Third World.  While the book is obviously in need of either an update or a sequel the issue, which had largely been dormant for a decade or more, has been brought back to life with a vengeance by the present Trudeau Liberals.

When it comes to the topic of the ongoing moral and social decay of our country and Western Civilization in general in the post-World War II era the best and certainly most exhaustive book by a Canadian that comes to my mind is The War Against the Family: A Parent Speaks Out On the Political, Economic, and Social Policies That Threaten Us All.  The author was the late William D. Gairdner who competed for Canada in the 1964 Summer Olympics before going to university and earning his Ph.D. and becoming a well-known small-c conservative speaker and writer.  This, his second book, was originally published in hardback in1992 by Stoddart of Toronto who released a paperback edition the following year.  After Stoddart folded, BPS Books of Toronto re-released the paperback edition in 2007 with a new cover which as far as I can tell is the only revision made.  In connection with this book I would also recommend by the same author The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defence of Universals (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2008).  Where the first book looks at such matters as “Compulsory Miseducation”, “Moral Values and Sex Ed”, “The Feminist Mistake: Women Against the Family”, “Women at War: On the Military, Day Care and Home Fronts”, “Radical Homosexuals vs. The Family”, “The Invisible Holocaust: Abortion vs. the Family” to give a few chapter titles in whole or in part from the perspective of the official policies behind the various changes involved the second book digs deeper and addresses the basic ideas of which the official policies are practical applications.

The War Against the Family included a chapter on euthanasia as well as a chapter on abortion and this has become a far more timely topic due to the present government’s having introduced the world’s most aggressive and extreme euthanasia policy in M.A.I.D.  Another book that addressed both abortion and euthanasia from the perspective of showing how the Modern technological way of thinking and doing has conditioned people to reject the older way of thinking about justice that rejected and condemned these things and to embrace a newer way of thinking that accepts them was George Grant’s final book Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Ananasi Press, 1986).  The chapters on abortion and euthanasia are the last two in the book and these Grant co-wrote with his wife Sheila.

Bill Whatcott’s Born In a Graveyard: One man’s transformation from a violent, drug-addicted criminal into Canada’s most outspoken family values activist (Langley: Good Character Books, 2014) is the autobiography, or perhaps testimony would be a better word, of a man who has paid the price for translating his Christian views on these matters, especially abortion and homosexuality, into practice in the form of activism.  Whatcott was charged by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission for distributing pamphlets that colourfully expressed his opinion about the alphabet soup gang’s public schools agenda.  The Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal ruled against Whatcott who appealed to what was then the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench (now King’s Bench) which upheld the Tribunal’s ruling, then to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal which ruled in favour of Whatcott causing the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada which held hearings in 2011 and unanimously ruled in 2013 that while Whatcott’s rights under section 2 of the Charter had indeed been violated those who so violated them were allowed to get away with it because of the loop-hole in section 1. Needless to say this asinine ruling in which the expression of “detestation” and “vilification” was declared to be outside the protection of free expression (I suspect that the “detestation” and “vilification” of white people, men, and Christians is treated as an exception) was not exactly a step in the direction of freeing Canadians from the unjust shackles of censorship and self-censorship that the first Trudeau introduced early in his premiership.  Today it is part of the legal precedent that the second Trudeau and his cronies look to in order to justify and explain their attempts to pass draconian laws telling us what we can and cannot say on the internet.   Since Whatcott is up before the Supreme Court again this time on charges pertaining to his creative evangelistic efforts at a Hubris parade in Toronto a sequel may be on the horizon.

Canada: History

The first book on Canadian history that I recommend is W. L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada: A General History from Earliest Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963).  The author, who was born in Gladstone, was the head of the Department of History at the University of Manitoba from 1950 to 1964.  Among his other books, all of which are worth reading, are histories of the university and of the province.   Taking its name from the original full designation of the country proposed by the Fathers of Confederation this one-volume history of Canada ends on the eve of the second wave of seditious, Liberal, revolution-within-the-form under Pearson-Trudeau.


The second on my list would be the complete works of Donald G. Creighton.  Alright, you can omit Take-Over (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1978) because that is a novel, but The Young Politician (Toronto: Macmillan, 1952) and The Old Chieftain (Toronto: Macmillan, 1955), the two volumes of his biography of Sir John A. Macdonald must remain on the list for the story of the life of the foremost Father of Confederation is an absolutely essential part of Canadian history and no one tells it better than Creighton.  Read both volumes in the original editions if you can, but if you must read the current one-volume edition from the University of Toronto Press consider skipping over the introduction by Creighton’s own biographer, Donald Wright of the University of New Brunswick.  His apologizing for Creighton’s not holding to the stomach-churning, woke, entirely-wrong, perspectives of the present day are bad enough in his biography of Creighton without marring Creighton’s masterful account of Sir John’s life.  My recommendation again is for the entire corpus of Creighton’s writings.  I will not list them all but a few deserve special mention.  The book that earned him his reputation is one of these, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850 (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1937), in which Creighton tells the history of the use of the St. Lawrence River as a means of trade and transportation in the century leading up to Confederation.  Goldwyn Smith had written a book that was published in the year of Sir John A. Macdonald’s death in which he argued that Confederation was a mistake because it was a project undertaken against the natural north-south flow of trade in North America.  That year, the Canadian public gave their answer to Smith’s thesis by awarding Macdonald, who was running against Sir Wilfred Laurier’s Liberals who were campaigning on a platform of free trade, a landslide victory.  Creighton’s book was the scholarly answer.  Editions of it published from 1956 on have omitted the “Commercial” from the title.  His The Forked Road: Canada 1939-1957 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976) was published as Volume XVIII, the penultimate of the Canadian Centenary Series that he and W. L. Morton had started and edited.  It can also be regarded as the last in a series of books that he authored bringing the history of Canada down from the pre-Confederation period that he covered in The Commercial Empire and The Road to Confederation: The Emergence of Canada, 1863-1867 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964) down to the end of the St. Laurent premiership.  While I don’t think anybody would claim that this was the best book he ever wrote it is too often criticized for taking the opinion that the Liberals under King and St. Laurent were leading the country down into the sewer if not lower.  Creighton died three years after it was published.  Imagine what he would have said if he had lived to write the history of the two Trudeau eras.

The penultimate entry in this section is David Orchard’s The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 1993, revised and expanded edition Montreal: Robert Davies Multimedia Publishing: 1998).  This book is a history of Canadian resistance to continentalism and particularly to American economic conquest via free trade.  The first edition came out during the talks on expanding the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement that Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, both men betraying the protectionist traditions of their own parties, had signed in 1988 into the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which came into effect on the first day of 1994.  The expanded edition came out during Orchard’s campaign for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1998.  This was also the occasion for the writing/compilation of Ron Dart’s The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes (Dewdney BC: Synaxis Press, 1999) which is why I am adding it here rather than in the general political philosophy section.

Canada: Christianity

The first book in this section will be the Right Rev. Philip Carrington’s The Anglican Church of Canada: A History (Toronto: Collins, 1963).  This book was first published the same year as W. L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada in which year the second wave of the Liberal subversion of the country began under the premiership of Lester Pearson.  A small-l, theological liberal subversion of the Church was already underway.  A small indication of that can be seen in the 1962 Canadian edition of the Book of Common Prayer, in which the Psalter is bowdlerized to omit the imprecatory portions of the Psalms, including the 58th in its entirety.   This was unfortunate in that it marred what is otherwise an excellent adaptation of the Restoration BCP of 1662.  It was a mild display of liberalism, however, compared to that which would soon sweep the Church leading to the present day in which I dare say most of the prelates wish that this history, written by the seventh Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec who went on to become the eleventh Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada, would be swept under the rug and forgotten.

With regards to the liberal sweep of the Church I recommend two books both written in the late 1990s.  Suicide – The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada? (Cambridge Publishing House, 1999) was written by Dr. Marney Patterson who was sometimes described as the “Anglican Billy Graham.” He wrote six other books with more uplifting topics and by the time he passed away two years ago had transferred to the Anglican Network in Canada.  A year prior to this Rev. George R. Eves had released Two Religions One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada (Saint John: V.O.I.C.E., 1998) which he has recently updated and made available as an e-book.  While the increasing willingness of the Church to depart from both Scripture and Tradition on the matter of moral theology as it pertains to those attracted to their own sex was the occasion for the writing of both of these books, Dr. Patterson and Rev. Eves both address the larger problem of liberalism.  Dr. Patterson dealt well with the matter of how the unwillingness to stand for unpopular Scriptural truth compromises the Church’s ability to evangelize.  Rev. Eves discussed how the introduction of the Book of Alternative Services, which in many parishes is not so much an alternative to the Book of Common Prayer but its replacement, was a victory for liberalism since on the lex orandi, lex credenda principle if you change the liturgy you change the belief.  These books both came out within five years of the conference sponsored by the Prayer Book Society, Anglican Renewal Ministries, and Barnabas Ministries for the purpose of addressing these concerns that produced the Montreal Declaration of Anglican Essentials.  The papers at the conference were edited by George Egerton and published as Anglican Essentials: Reclaiming Faith Within the Anglican Church of Canada (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1995).

One of the speakers at the Montreal Essentials conference was the Rev. Dr. Robert D. Crouse, a priest and academic from Nova Scotia, where his home town was Crousetown, in which the house where he grew up was on Crouse Road (his family had lived there for centuries).  His address to the conference was entitled “Hope Which Does Not Disappoint” in which he warned against “that most dangerous of all sins” despair, to which souls, left weary and lethargic from the “widespread destruction of theological and liturgical tradition” resulting from the false persuasion that the ancient, ecumenical, and Anglican heritage is “somehow outmoded and inappropriate in the present time” are tempted and gave the timely reminder that our “spiritual health depends crucially on a revival of hope”, the virtue that is the opposite of the vice of despair, and which rests upon faith in the promises of God.  I cannot recommend a book that Dr. Crouse wrote because while he contributed to books and wrote plenty of reviews and articles, he never wrote a book qua book.  His doctoral dissertation was a translation.  Last year, however, Darton, Longman & Todd in London released three books compiled from his sermons.  These are Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Witness in Christian Spirituality, The Souls Pilgrimage – Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost: The Theology of the Christian Year: The Sermons of Robert Crouse and The Soul’s Pilgrimage – Volume 2: The Descent of the Dove and the Spiritual Life: The Theology of the Christian Year: The Sermons of Robert Crouse.  He had talked to Essentials about the need for renewing the Christian spiritual life, these books describe what that very thing looks like.

Two other speakers at the Montreal Essentials conference were Ron Dart and J. I. Packer.  In response to a book by Michael Ingham, who occupied the See of New Westminster at the time and basically stood for the opposite of what Essentials stood for, they wrote In a Pluralist World (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1998) which returned to print in 2019 under the new title Christianity and Pluralism and published by Lexham Press in Bellingham.  While the origins of this book place it in the context of the same ecclesiastical turmoil that produced the books mentioned in the previous paragraphs Dart and Packer concentrate here on the question of the competing ways that have been proposed for Christians to deal with the competing truth claims of multiculturalism. Since I mentioned another book by Dart in the previous section I would add another book by Packer except that my favourites of his books were all written before he moved to Canada.   So read the revised editions.

One thing that Anglican bishops and fundamentalist Baptists have in common is that they tend to be great subjects for biographies and to write excellent autobiographies.  The Right Reverend John Cragg Farthing, father of the John Farthing mentioned in the first section (whose middle name was Colborne so this is not a case of Sr. and Jr. which requires all the names to match) and the Bishop of Montreal in the early twentieth century wrote an excellent memoir entitled Recollections of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing, Bishop of Montreal (1909-1939).  It was printed without any publication information but was likely published either by Farthing himself or by what would then have been called the Church of England in Canada at some point in the early 1940s. The Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Bishop of Toronto and an important figure in pre-Confederation Canada did not write his own biography but his successor the Right Reverend A. N. Bethune wrote a very readable Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, D.D., D. C. L., First Bishop of Toronto (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1870).  If the title confuses you note that while “memoirs” and “autobiography” are often used interchangeably they are not the same thing.  An autobiography is when someone tells the story of his own life.  A memoir is recorded memory of something, an event, a person, whatever.  There is a lot of overlap but basically in an autobiography one’s self is always the subject whereas one’s memoir can be focused on the people and places and events one knew rather than on one’s self. An account of someone else’s life can be called a memoir if the writer knew the person well which is the case here.  Either type can be called a memoir.  If there is an s on the end it is referring either to more than one book or, less properly but more commonly, to the kind that overlaps with autobiography.  The Most Reverend Robert Machray, the second Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land to which my own parish belongs, became the first primate of what would become the Anglican Church of Canada.  His biography, written by a nephew of the same name, came out the year he died.  That is Robert Machray, Life of Robert Machray, Archbishop of Rupert’s Land (Toronto: Macmillan, 1909).

As for the fundamentalist Baptists, since we are listing Canadian books here the obvious biography to mention is Leslie K. Tarr’s Shields of Canada (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1967).  Like his subject, Leslie K. Tarr was a Baptist minister, as well as the first editor of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s publication Faith Today.  His subject, T. T. Shields was the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto and of the Baptist preachers who fought for orthodoxy against encroaching liberalism in their denomination was by far the most prominent Canadian.  He joined the short-lived Baptist Bible Union and in consequence is usually remembered alongside that group’s co-founders, W. B. Riley of Minneapolis and J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth as a sort of triumvirate of the Baptist fundamentalism of the era.  Honourable mention goes to Lois Neely’s Fire In His Bones: The Official Biography of Oswald J. Smith (Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 1982).  Oswald J. Smith was not a Baptist.  He was first ordained a Presbyterian minister, then switched to Christian and Missionary Alliance (the founder of which, A. B. Simpson, was originally a Presbyterian from Prince Edward Island), before founding the non-denominational megachurch the People’s Church of Toronto.  As pastor of People’s Church before handing the reins over to his son Paul B. Smith he was probably the best known evangelical preacher in Canada in the twentieth century.  I’ll also throw in Perry F. Rockwood’s Triumph in God: The Life Story of Radio Pastor Perry F. Rockwood (Halifax: The People’s Gospel Hour, 1974).  At fifty-seven pages and staple bound it is a booklet rather than a book and the only one to make it into this list.  Rockwood was ordained in the Presbyterian Church of Canada in 1943 which at that point consisted of the parishes that had opted to remain Presbyterian after most, about seventy percent, had joined with the Methodists to become the United Church in 1925.   While one might think that those who opted out of the merger would be very conservative and orthodox it was only a few years after his ordination that Rockwood was hauled before an ecclesiastical court over four sermons he gave on the subject of “The Church Sick unto Death” and while a case could made that he was indeed guilty of the charge of “divisiveness” a stronger case can be made that those who put him on trial were guilty of exactly what he charged them with in the sermons i.e., the greater crime of defecting, not only from the Presbyterian Westminster Confession but from the basic Christian faith as confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. The four sermons are reproduced in full in his autobiography.

This section would not be complete without The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years, a twelve-volume history of Christianity that was produced from 2001 to 2013.  The idea for it came from the late Ted Byfield, most remembered as the founding editor and publisher of the Alberta Report newsmagazine the final version of which folded in 2003 the year the first volume was published.  Byfield served as general editor of the series.  The series was published out of Edmonton under the imprint of The Christian History Project which after 2006 came under the aegis of SEARCH, the Society to Explore And Record Christian History.  I exclude volume 10 from the recommendation because it presents the Enlightenment, the separation of church and state, and basically the Modern way of doing things or liberalism as the product, albeit unintended, of Christianity rather than what it actually is, the embodiment of the Modern Age’s apostasy from and rebellion against Christianity.  Byfield began his Christian walk as an orthodox Anglican and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in the events mentioned previously in this section and so has no excuse for not knowing better.

Canada – Humour

All of Stephen Leacock’s fiction can be included here, as can, for that matter, his non-fiction for even when writing on serious subjects he was funny.

Peter V. Macdonald, Q. C., a lawyer from Hanover had a column that appeared in the Toronto Star entitled “Court Jesters” in which he recounted hilarious true anecdotes from courtrooms across Canada.  A compilation of these was published as Court Jesters: Canada’s Lawyers and Judges Take the Stand to Relate Their Funniest Stories (Toronto: Stoddart, 1985).  This was followed up by a sequel More Court Jesters: Back to the Bar for More of the Funniest Stories from Canada’s Courts (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987) and then Return of the Court Jesters: By Popular Demand More of the Funniest Stories From Canada’s Courts (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990).  I received the first one of these for Christmas one year and annoyed my family for days with loud laughter.  There are also versions of at least the first two books in which the anecdotes are illustrated with cartoons.  It appears he also wrote a book with funny police stories.  I have not seen a copy although I have read a similar book by Bruce Day, a retired police officer here in Winnipeg, that was self-published in 1995 and is entitled Stop! Police Humour.

Another collection of hilarious true stories is Ben Wicks’ Book of Losers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979).  The author whose name is indeed part of the title was best known as a cartoonist.  He followed it up with Ben Wicks’ More Losers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982).  It should be obvious what these stories are like but if not here is the definition of a loser provided at the beginning of the first book “A German tourist, en route to the west coast, who steps off his plane in Bangor, Maine, and spends four days there thinking he is in California.”  Actually that is quite mild compared to what happens to most of the people in the book.  Wicks’ wrote and illustrated several other books of humour.  The only two that I have read are his Ben Wicks’ Canada and Ben Wicks’ Women which were also published by McClelland and Stewart in 1976 and 1978 respectively.

Canada – Fiction

I will not be listing all the titles and bibliographic details in this section because it would be very tedious due to the number of lengthy series included.  What I recommend under this heading are all the works of fiction of Lucy Maud Montgomery, Robertson Davies, and Mazo de la Roche.  Remember that this recommended reading list, neither in whole nor in any section, is intended to be exhaustive, and that non-mention of an author does not constitute a recommendation against.  There are Canadian writers that I would recommend against but I am not going to name them here because that is not the purpose of this list.

L. M. Montgomery is, of course, internationally famous as the author of Anne of Green Gables, the first in a series of eight novels chronicling the life of the title character.  Two collections of short stories, Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea are also part of the Anne of Green Gables continuity.  If you remember Kevin Sullivan’s television series Road to Avonlea it was based in part on these short stories although the main characters of that series were taken from The Story Girl and The Golden Road neither of which were connected to the Anne storyline in Montgomery’s original novels.  She wrote several other novels, some in series such as the Emily of New Moon trilogy, others stand alone.

Robertson Davies tended to write his fiction in trilogies, including those that he wrote as “Samuel Marchbanks” the pen-name he used when writing for the Peterborough Examiner in his time as editor.   A selection of his Marchbanks pieces were collected and published as three volumes, although it is best, in my opinion, to read them in the later omnibus edition The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks for while some abridgement takes place you also get a great introduction in which Davies interviews his alter-ego Marchbanks. There are three completed trilogies of novels that are usually called the Salterton, Deptford and Cornish trilogies, the first two after the fictional locations in which they are set, the third after the character whose death sets off the plot of the first novel and whose life is told in the second.  Davies started a fourth trilogy, set in Toronto, but only completed two of the novels.  The earliest of these trilogies, the Salterton, is my favourite.  Davies also wrote several plays but only one book of short stories, High Spirits, a collection of the ghost stories that he composed to tell at Massey College at the school’s Gaudy Night each year while he was Master (president, headmaster, principal) there.

Mazo de la Roche was for much of the twentieth century the single most read Canadian novelist.  An interesting piece of trivia is that she is buried in St. George’s Anglican cemetery at Sibbald Point in Sutton West the other most famous resident of which is Stephen Leacock whose grave is very close to hers.  She wrote short stories and plays as well, but is most remembered for her twenty some novels of which the most read are the Jalna series, a family saga, somewhat like a novelized soap opera, spanning one century over sixteen books.  Jalna was the first published in 1927.  Its title is the name of the family estate or more properly the manor on the estate where the novels are set.  The family that live there bear the last name Whiteoak and so the series is also known albeit less commonly as the Whiteoak saga.  The hero of the saga is Renny Whiteoak, who inherits the estate and the role if not the authority of family patriarch from his father and grandfather, fights in both World Wars, and breeds and rides show horses while trying to raise his own younger brothers and keep the struggling estate afloat.   We had a number of hard cover editions of these books in the family library when I was a child.  The ones I remember usually featured Renny on a horse on the cover.  The real ruler of the family was Renny’s grandmother Adeline whom the family called Gran, a sharp-tongued old woman who kept them all in line by not disclosing the sole beneficiary of her will and who had a parrot that she taught to make extremely rude remarks in Hindi.  The books were not published in order of internal chronology, although as with C. S. Lewis’ children’s novels subsequent re-print editions have numbered them in that order. The last of the series to be published, Morning at Jalna, which came out in 1960 the year before de la Roche died, is second in internal chronology, being set just prior to Confederation in the period in which the American North and South were fighting.  This book’s not-so-subtle sympathy with the South was a not-so-subtle expression of de la Roche’s contemptuous opinion of the “second Reconstruction” then underway in the United States.  That such sentiment prevented neither the publication of the novel nor the adaptation of the entire series into the television mini-series The Whiteoaks of Jalna and by CBC nonetheless about ten years after her death demonstrates how much healthier and saner our country was in terms of not having to toe a party line on liberal social values before two generations of Trudeaus messed everything up.  The last of the novels in terms of internal chronology was Centenary at Jalna and it was set in the year in which it is was published, 1954.  That it is set exactly one hundred years after the story begins, as the title indicates, would suggest that this was where de la Roche intended the saga to end, although the ending of the novel itself very much suggests otherwise

That brings this list to a close.  If you are looking for something to read this Dominion Day because some Canada-hating woke jackasses have cancelled the celebrations in your area try one or more of these.

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 12:30 AM

Labels: Dominion Day, Donald Creighton, Eugene Forsey, George Grant, John Farthing, John G. Diefenbaker, L. M. Montgomery, Mazo De La Roche, Peter V. Macdonald, Robertson Davies, Ron Dart, Stephen Leacock, W. L. Morton

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

New Day? No Thanks, I’ll Take the Old(er)!– Dominion Day

Posted on by

                                                  Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, July 1, 2022

New Day? No Thanks, I’ll Take the Old(er)!– Dominion Day

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a great deal of talk here in Winnipeg about the announcement that today’s big party at the Forks would be called “New Day” instead of “Canada Day”, would be a whole bunch of pissing and moaning about wrongs real and imagined inflicted upon the Indians instead of a celebration of our country, and would not include the usual fireworks celebration.   Interestingly, Sunday evening, while enjoying a coffee at Tim Horton’s and trying to read a chapter out of the book of Isaiah, I overheard snatches of conversation from a couple at a nearby table with regards to all of this.  The man was boisterously objecting to all of these changes, especially the cancelling of the fireworks.   The woman was defending the changes, toeing the progressive party line on the subject.  For what it’s worth, the man was an Indian and the woman was lily white.

Among the more prominent of the local critics of these changes – I add the modifier “local” because it has attracted commentary from across the Dominion, including Toronto’s Anthony Furey and Edmonton’s Lorne Gunter – are Lloyd Axworthy and Jenny Motkaluk.    The former, who from 1979 to 2000 was the MP for Winnipeg – Fort Garry then Winnipeg South Centre when the former was dissolved and the latter reconstituted in 1988, during which time he served as Minister for various portfolios in Liberal governments under Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, and later became president of the University of Winnipeg, the furthest to the left of the city’s academic institutions, expressed his criticism in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, a Liberal party propaganda rag that likes to think of itself as a newspaper.   The latter is one of the candidates for the office about to be vacated by Mayor Duckie whom she had previously but sadly unsuccessfully attempted to unseat in the 2018 mayoral election.   Ryan Stelter responded to Motkaluk with a column that appeared in the Winnipeg Sun – the local neoconservative tabloid – in which he defended the decision by the powers that be at the Forks, their reasons for the change, and basically argued that while the biggest party in the city has been re-named and re-imagined this does not prevent anyone else from celebrating the holiday as they like.

While I suspect Stelter of disingenuity – his argument is technically correct but does not address the real problems with the thinking behind the changes likely because he doesn’t want to be seen as dissenting from that thinking – I shall, nevertheless, be doing as he suggests and celebrating the holiday the way I like.     This means that like the crowd at the Forks, I will not be celebrating “Canada Day”.   Unlike the crowd at the Forks, however, I shall not be celebrating the atrociously progressive “New Day” either – perhaps they should have called it “New DIE” from the appropriate acronym for Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity – but shall be celebrating, as I do every first of July, Dominion Day.  This is Canada’s true national holiday and the first of July bore this name until the Liberals changed it in 1982.   Since the Liberals did not do so honestly and constitutionally – only thirteen members, less than a quorum, were sitting at the time that the private member’s bill changing the name was rushed through all the readings without debate in less than five minutes, hence the Honourable Eugene Forsey’s description of this as “something very close to sneak-thievery” – I think that continuing to celebrate Dominion Day rather than Canada Day is appropriate.   I am in good company in this.  The great Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies called Dominion Day “splendid” and Canada Day “wet” in reference to its being “only one letter removed from the name of a soft drink”.  

I will say this about Canada Day, however.   Like Dominion Day it is a celebration of our country as a whole.  Indeed, Dominion Day and Canada Day, are two different celebrations of Canada based on two different visions of what ought to celebrated about the country.   I will elaborate on that momentarily.   First I will point out the contrast.   Attempts at a post-Canada Day holiday, as this New Day would appear to be, seem to be attempts at having a celebration on the country’s anniversary without celebrating the country at all but rather celebrating progressive ideals and the group identities of groups within Canada who are favoured by the left while allotting shame and dishonour to the country (and to groups within it who are not favoured by the left).   Ironically, considering that the sort of people who think up this sort of thing are always going on about “inclusivity”, this is incredibly divisive.   It is also insane.

Canada Day is a celebration of the Canada of the Liberal vision.   That Canada is best described by the title of a 1935 history by John Wesley Dafoe, the Liberal Party promoter who edited the Winnipeg Free Press for the first half of the twentieth century, Canada: An American Nation.   By deliberately omitting the word “North” Dafoe expressed his idea that Canada is essentially American – possessing the same culture and values as the United States, and on the same political trajectory historically, away from the British Empire and towards democratic republican nationalism, albeit pursuing that path through means other than war.   Those who share this vision of Canada have historically regarded the Liberal Party as the guardians of Canada’s journey down this path or, as it has often been stated, “the natural ruling party of Canada”.    This is what the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton derisively called the “Authorized Version”, the Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History that was, before the Cultural Marxist version in which the history of Canada, the United, States, and Western Civilization is treated as nothing but racism, sexism, and other such isms, permeated academe, authoritatively taught in Liberal-leaning history classrooms, which were most of them.   What critics of the left-wing of the Liberal Party – the branch of the party most associated with the two Trudeaus and Jean Chretien – and particularly the neoconservatives who look for inspiration and ideas primarily if not solely to the American “conservative” movement, often fail to grasp is that this is the Liberal vision of Canada even when the party’s left-wing, which spouts the same sort of anti-American rhetoric as the American Cold War era New Left, is controlling the party, and perhaps especially so.   The symbols associated with Canada Day, such as the flag introduced by Lester Pearson in 1965, like the name of the holiday itself, are symbols that point to Canada while saying nothing about her history and traditions, symbols that were introduced by Liberals to replace older ones that also pointed to Canada but did speak about her history and traditions.   The historical events highlighted in this vision of Canada are events in which the Liberal Party led the country.   In recent decades the main one of these was the repatriation of the British North America Act of 1867 in 1982 and the addition to it of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   In repatriating the British North America Act, it was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867.   Everything asserted a few sentences earlier about the symbols associated with Canada Day is true of this change as well and the new name reflects the American understanding of the word “constitution”, i.e., a piece of paper telling the government what to do, rather than the traditional British-Canadian understanding of the word as meaning the institutions of the state as they actually exist and operate in a living tradition that is largely unwritten.   Similarly, it was the American Bill of Rights that the authors of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had in mind when they added this to the repatriated BNA, although, many of us have been warning for years and as is painfully obvious after the medical tyranny of the last two and a half years, and especially the harsh fascist crackdown on those peacefully protesting against this tyranny in Ottawa earlier this year, the Charter simply does not provide the same level of protection as the American Bill.     The Charter did not provide us with anything worth having that we did not already have by right of the Common Law and the long tradition of protected rights and freedoms associated with it including such highlights as the Magna Carta.    Furthermore, it weakened the most important rights and freedoms mentioned in it – the fundamental freedoms of Section 2 and the legal rights of Sections 7 to 14, institutionalized the injustice of reverse de jure discrimination – Section 15 b), and provided no protection whatsoever to property rights which in the older tradition which both we and the Americans inherited occupy the spot where the Americans put “the pursuit of happiness” in one of the founding documents of their tradition as it branched off from the older.  Perhaps the most significant single effect of the Charter was to transform our Supreme Court into an American-style activist Court which it had not been up unto that point.   The American Supreme Court has been activist so long that now, when it has finally reversed one of its most notorious activist rulings – Roe  v Wade – and returned the right to legislate protection for the lives of the unborn to the lawmaking assemblies from which it stole it in 1973, the American progressives whose causes have benefited from the vast majority of judicial activism have seen this as illegitimate judicial activism and have been behaving like extremely spoiled children who have finally received long-overdue discipline.   The point, however, is that these changes, arguably the most Americanizing of any the Liberal Party has ever made, were introduced by a Liberal government when the party was controlled by its left-wing, despite that left-wing’s Communist-sympathizing anti-American rhetoric.

Dominion Day is a celebration of the Canada that was formally established as a country when the British North America Act came into effect on 1 July, 1867.    The country was given the name Canada, which name, originally the Iroquois word for “village”, was mistaken by Jacques Cartier for the St. Lawrence region, then applied to the society of French settlers established there, then, after this French society and its territory were ceded to the British Crown by the French Crown after the Seven Years War, and the Americans seceded from the British Crown to establish their Modern, liberal, republic, became the name of two provinces of the British Empire, one French Catholic and the other English Protestant, located in this territory, the latter populated by the Loyalists who had fled persecution in the American republic.   These provinces were united into one in 1841, which proved almost immediately to be a mistake, and the search for a solution to the problems this fusion generated was one of the main reasons for Confederation in which the two provinces were separated once again, but made part of a larger federation of British North American provinces that was given the name common to both.   Dominion was the title the Fathers of Confederation gave the country that would bear the name country.   The title of a country, as distinct from its name, is supposed to tell you what kind of a country it is, that is to say, the nature of the constitution of the state.   If a country has “People’s Republic” as its title, for example, that tells us that it is a Communist, totalitarian, hellhole.   The “Dominion” in Canada’s title tells us that she is a parliamentary monarchy, a kingdom or realm under the reign of the monarch we share with the United Kingdom, governed by her own Parliament.   When the Liberals were waging war against the title “Dominion” from the 1960s to the 1980s, they maintained that it was a synonym for “colony” and was imposed upon Canada from London in the nineteenth century, but none of that was true.  The most charitable interpretation of the Liberals making these claims is that they were ignorant of history, an interpretation that would seem to be supported by the Honourable Eugene Forsey’s account, in his memoirs, of his attempts to educate his Liberal colleagues in the Senate about these things during this period, although a less charitable interpretation might be more appropriate for the top leaders of the party.   The reality is that the Fathers of Confederation had “Kingdom of Canada” as their first choice, were advised by London to pick something less provocative to our neighbours to the South, and chose “Dominion” as a synonym for “Kingdom” from Psalm 72:8.

Dominion Day, as a celebration of this Canada, is a celebration of a vision of Canada that is pretty much the opposite of the Liberal vision of Canada, and an interpretation of her history that is the opposite of the “Authorized Version”.   To call it the Conservative vision and interpretation of Canada would be very misleading, I am afraid, because, those who currently use the moniker Conservative are generally light years removed from Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George-Étienne Cartier   Whatever you want to call it, however, it is the truer vision and interpretation of Canada.    The Confederation Project was not an attempt to do what the Americans had done in 1776 albeit without bloodshed.   It was an attempt to do the opposite of what the Americans had done – to take the provinces of the British Empire in North America, and build out of them a new country without severing ties with the United Kingdom and the Empire, using the Westminster Parliament as its model rather than devising a new constitution from scratch.   For the Fathers of Confederation in 1864 to 1867, as with the English and French Canadians who fought alongside the British Imperial army and its Indian allies from 1812 to 1815, and the ancestors of the same during the American Revolution four decades earlier, the threat to their freedom came from the American Republic, with its “Manifest Destiny”, cloaking its dreams of conquest in the rhetoric of “liberation”.   The British Crown and Empire were not tyrannical forces from which the Canadians needed to be “liberated” (1) but the guardian forces that protected Canadian freedom from American conquest.    The threat of American conquest did not just magically go away on 1 July, 1867.  The efforts of Sir John’s government in the decades that followed, to bring the rest of British North America into Confederation, to settle the prairies, and to build the transcontinental railroad that would unite the country economically, were all carried out with the threat of a United States hoping and wishing for him to fail so that they might swoop in and gobble up Canada looming over head.   Aiding and abetting the would-be American conquerors were their fifth column in Canada, the Liberals.   In Sir John’s last Dominion election, held in March 1891 only a couple of months prior to the stroke that incapacitated him shortly before his death, he faced a Liberal opponent, Sir Wilfred Laurier, who campaigned on a platform of “unrestricted reciprocity”, which is more commonly called “free trade”, with the United States.   Sir John called this treason, pointing out that free trade would create an economic union that would be the wedge in the door for cultural and political union with the United Sates.   That very year Liberal intellectual Goldwin Smith published a book, Canada and the Canada Question, that argued that Confederation was a mistake, that economics is everything, that trade in North America is naturally north-south rather than east-west – this was effectively rebutted by Harold Innis in The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and Donald Creighton in The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1937) – and that union with the United States was both desirable and inevitable.   Sir John won another majority government in his last Dominion election by vigorously opposing all of this.

Sir John’s victory over Laurier in 1891 demonstrated that his vision of Canada, rather than the Liberal vision, was shared not just by the other Fathers of Confederation but by most Canadians.  That this remained true well into the Twentieth Century was evident in how the Liberals were the most likely to lose elections in which they most stressed the free trade plank of their platform and in the Loyalist spirit demonstrated by the Canadians who rallied to the call of King, Country, and Empire in two World Wars.   Even the Grit Prime Minister during the Second World War, who had mocked the Imperial war effort during the First World War, who was the very embodiment of the Liberal continentalist free trader, and who was actually an admirer of the dictator who led the other side – following his brief interview with Hitler in 1937, Mackenzie King wrote a gushing entry about him in his diary, in which he described the German tyrant in almost Messianic terms, comparing him to Joan of Arc, and employing language that would have sounded just as creepy had Hitler turned out to be the man of peace he thought him to be – had enough of that spirit to do his duty and lead Canada into the war alongside Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth.   Unfortunately, one of the consequences of that conflict was that the United States became the leading power in Western Civilization and immediately began to reshape the West into its own image.   To make matters worse around this same time mass communications technology, especially the television, became ubiquitous both a) facilitating the permeation of English Canadian culture with the mass pop culture produced in the culture factories of Los Angeles, and b) greatly increasing the influence of the newsmedia, which had been heavily slanted towards the Liberals since even before Confederation when George Brown edited the Globe, which evolved into today’s Globe and Mail.   These are among the foremost of the factors which produced the shift in popular thinking away from the truer, founding, vision of Canada celebrated in Dominion Day to the Liberal vision celebrated in Canada Day.   They are also among the factors that led George Grant, Canada’s greatest philosopher, traditionalist, and critic of technology, to pen his jeremiad for our country, Lament for a Nation, in 1965.

If the exponential growth in media power due to the development of mass communications technology and the post-World War II Americanization of Western Civilization as a whole are responsible for the shift in popular thought to the Liberal vision, how then do we explain this subsequent shift to the new, “woke” Left view, in which Canada, and everything that traditional Canadians celebrated about her in Dominion Day and Liberals in Canada Day, are regarded as cause for weeping and gnashing of teeth rather than celebration?

While the media certainly had a role in this as well – they were the ones, last year, remember, who, when various Indian bands began announcing that they had found ground disturbances – and this is all that they have found, to this date – on the grounds of former residential schools or in unmarked sections of cemeteries, irresponsibly reported this as “proof” of a conspiracy theory about the residential schools having been death camps where priests murdered kids by the thousands – it is our educational system that must bear the blame for the fact that so many people were stupid and ignorant enough to believe this stercus tauri.  It has been sixty-nine years since Hilda Neatby wrote and published So Little for the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education in which she lambasted the education bureaucrats who in most if not all Canadian provinces had decided in the decade or so prior to her writing to impose the educational “reforms” proposed by wacko, environmentalist (in the sense of taking the nurture side in the nature/nurture debate rather than the sense of being a tree-hugging, save-the-planet, do-gooder, although he may have been that too), atheist, secular humanist, Yankee philosopher John Dewey upon Canadian public schools.    This meant out with a curriculum focused on giving children facts to learn, expecting them to learn them, and acquainting them with the literary canon of the Great Conversation so that by exposing them to the Swiftian “sweetness and light” of Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” they might be inspired to rise above their natural barbarism or philistinism and learn to think and ask questions and strive for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.  It meant in with a curriculum that was “child-centred”, which in practice meant dumbed down so as to minimize or eliminate content of which the child cannot immediately recognize its pragmatic utility to himself, although Dewey and his followers, who were decades ahead of everyone else in terms of solipsistic, narcissistic, psycho-babble, dressed it up in terms of helping the child maximize his potential.   Those sympathetic to the methods of Dewey et al. thought of these reforms as a positive shift from a passive education in which the teacher gives the student the content to be learned and the student receives it to an active education in which the student is trained to learn by self-discovery.   Neatby recognized these methods for what they really were – the means of transforming schools from institutions that provide their students with the intellectual tools necessary to live in control of their own lives as free people into institutions that train people to be docile, unquestioning, members of a more planned, more controlled, and more collectivist sort of society.   Her warnings largely went ignored, although she was commemorated with a stamp twenty-two years ago.   Even though the environmentalist presuppositions underlying Dewey’s system have been thoroughly debunked in the intervening decades, his theories survive as the dominant educational philosophy, albeit having been periodically translated into the latest forms of newspeak.      Meanwhile university level academics have mostly stopped criticizing the way the schools under the new system are failing to prepare students for a university education, but have instead accommodated the universities to the situation by transforming them into indoctrination centres in which their unquestioning and docile but also navel-gazingly narcissistic “student” bodies have their heads stuffed with every conceivable form of left-wing group identity politics – there are entire divisions of universities now dedicated to specific forms of this – and the deranged post-Marxist crackpot left-wing theories – intersectionality, Critical Theory (Race and otherwise), etc. – that support them.   The subversion and perversion of our educational system just described is the reason so many were quick to unthinkingly and unquestioningly accept the media’s irresponsible claims that the discovery of soil disturbances by ground-penetrating radar constitutes proof of the conspiracy theory that government-funded, church-operated, schools were murdering their students in some giant plot involving the highest officials of church, state, and a host of other institutions, that a defrocked United Church minister (2) pulled out of his rear end decades ago.    It is the reason so many were willing to commit the chronological snobbery of judging ex post facto our country’s past leaders by the left-wing standards of today’s progressives, the injustice of accepting a condemnation of our country in which only the accuser has been allowed to be heard and the defence has been denied the right of cross-examination and of making a defence by the mob shouting “disrespect” and “denial” every time anyone raised a question or pointed out contra-narrative facts, and the impiety of thinking the worst of the generations that went before us.   Note how the words “colonialism” and “imperialism” are constantly on the lips of such people, being used negatively in precisely the manner described by Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century in which he concluded that this usage, so different from how these terms are used by real historians, has reduced these words to “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers”.   This bespeaks the failure of the educational system.

So no, I will not be participating in any “New Day” that is the product of what passes for thinking in the minds of those whose acceptance of the left-wing narrative that our country is something to be mourned rather than celebrated testifies to the ruin of our educational system.    Nor, as an unreconstructed old Tory, will I be celebrating the Liberal vision for our country on “Canada Day”.   I shall once again raise my glass – or rather cup of coffee – to Sir John A. Macdonald and celebrate Canada’s true holiday, Dominion Day. — Gerry T. Neal 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!

(1)     For all of Jefferson’s Lockean rhetoric about natural law, unalienable rights, and the consent of the governed his 1776 accusations of “absolute tyranny” against George III and Parliament were nonsensical propaganda of the most risible sort, considering that the British government was one of the least intrusive governments in the world both at that time and in all of history up to that point.   

(2)     This is actually, in a twisted way, rather impressive.   It is far easier to be ordained in the United Church of Canada than to be defrocked.  

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dominion Day Dolour

Posted on by

Throne, Altar, Liberty

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!
Posted by

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

One Victory Against the Encroaching Totalitarianism

Posted on by

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

One Victory Against the Encroaching Totalitarianism

 
 
If anyone was under the impression that my harsh, negative, assessment of our civil leadership’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in my last essay was overblown, they need only look at the dirty trick the Liberals tried to pull this week. Parliament, which adjourned on March 13th until Hitler’s birthday – draw your own conclusions, was temporarily called back on Tuesday to vote on an emergency spending bill. The problem was not the $82 billion that the government was seeking permission to spend. The problem was that the bill, as originally drafted, included several provisions that would give them the power to increase spending and taxation without submitting the increases to Parliament for a vote.

Perhaps they thought that the panic that the media – which in Canada is almost monolithically the mouthpiece of the Liberal Party – has generated would be sufficient for them to get away with this. Or possibly they thought that all of their efforts over decades to get Canadians to devalue the traditions and institutions we inherited from Britain and to forget the history and significance of those traditions and institutions had finally paid off, and that we would be willing to let them overturn the Magna Carta and the very foundation of Parliamentary government and our Common Law liberties.

Mercifully, it appears they were wrong. Tuesday morning it was reported that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition were doing their job and firmly standing up for our traditional, constitutional, limits on government powers and that in the face of this staunch defence, the Liberals had backed down from their proposed power grab. Which is grounds for hope in this troubling times. The spirit of liberty has not yet been entirely crushed within us.

Later in the day, it was clarified that the tax powers were all that the Liberals had removed from the bill and that they were still pushing for the spending and borrowing powers. The Tories dug in in their opposition to these as well. The parties entered into negotiations but the day ended without the House being called upon to vote. This Wednesday morning – the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary – it was announced that the Liberals had dropped all the provisions for extended powers from the bill, which as an emergency spending bill has just passed the House, and will undoubtedly clear the Senate and receive Royal assent within a day or two.

I have been very critical of Andrew Scheer’s past performance as Opposition Leader and his bumbling in the last election but now, when it counts the most, it looks like he has come through for Canadians. Andrew Cohen, writing for the Ottawa Citizen, has praised the Prime Minister’s performance in this crisis saying “This has been his finest hour.” I beg to disagree. This – not the Kokanee Grope, not the costume party in India, not the Blackface/Brownface Scandal, not the SNC Lavalin Affair – has been Justin Trudeau, revealed at his worst – an opportunistic, tyrant, who has tried to take advantage of a global health crisis to attack the foundations of our constitution and expand his own powers. This is Andrew Scheer’s finest hour, not Justin Trudeau’s.

I am under no illusions that the majority of my countrymen see it my way rather than Cohen’s. Canadians have been far too apathetic for far too long towards the riches of our inheritance in the Common Law and the Westminster System of Parliament. It is almost one hundred years since the famous incident when Lord Byng, Governor General of Canada, exercised the reserve powers of the Crown and refused Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s request for a dissolution of Parliament. King, who had been allowed to form a government despite not having won the plurality in the House, wanted the dissolution to save his own bacon because he faced an imminent censure in Parliament over a corruption scandal. Lord Byng’s refusal was an entirely appropriate use of the Crown’s powers to protect Parliament’s right to hold the government accountable, as such champions of our constitution as John Farthing and Eugene Forsey demonstrated in their books on the subject. In the next Dominion election, however, the Canadian electorate bought King’s execrable lies about the matter hook, line, and sinker and awarded him a majority government.

That the government’s first thoughts with regards to dealing with this crisis were that they need to expand their powers beyond what the constitution allows them is itself sufficient evidence that they do not deserve to be trusted with such powers.

The approach they have been taking to the COVID-19 pandemic is further grounds not to trust them. Remember that this is a virus which in over eighty percent of the cases we know about has produced no symptoms to moderate symptoms. The actual percentage of those who have contracted the virus of whom this is true is probably closer to 99.99%. Most people who are asymptomatic would not have been tested unless they were in a situation where they were known to have been exposed to the virus. Thus, an approach to containing the disease which focuses on protecting those most vulnerable to experience it at its worst rather than protecting us all by shutting everything down and forcing us all into isolation makes the most sense. Countries that have aggressively pursued such an approach have succeeded in containing the spread of the disease without going into extreme shut down mode. Ironically, the countries which Mr. Cohen lists in the second paragraph of his column have all followed this approach, unlike Italy and the United States whose mishandling of the crisis he decries, despite the fact that they are following the same kind of approach, albeit with varying degrees of severity, as our own government.

The model which Mr. Trudeau is following is that of advising – and probably eventually compelling – all Canadians to stay at home, away from the threat of contagion, and also from the sun and fresh air which are man’s most important natural allies in the fight against disease. This involves shutting down all “non-essential” businesses and promising that the government will take care of the huge segment of the workforce which now founds itself unemployed. Since government is not a wealth generating institution – despite sometimes having delusions to the contrary – this means that the burden it is taking upon itself must fall upon the only part of the private economy that remains open – the “essential” businesses that provide food and other necessities, putting a strain on these which will, if this lasts for any lengthy period of time, cause them to fail. This would result in far more deaths than the collapse of the medical system that Mr. Trudeau is trying to avoid by the long-term strategy of slowing the spread of the virus and pushing its peak into the future ever would. The modern economy is the way in which we have avoided the Malthusian consequences of our population size. Anybody who is not an idiot knows this. “Lives are more important than the economy” is a lie concealed behind a moral truism. Destroy the economy, and you destroy the lives that it sustains. The Holodomor of almost ninety years ago is an historical example of how a regime used that principle to destroy lives deliberately with malice aforethought. If the Trudeau Liberals accomplish the same it will be primarily through stupidity.

Nor is shrinking the economy to the point where it cannot possibly feed our population and so causing the deaths of masses by starvation the only way in which the model the Trudeau government is pursuing could produce disastrous results. As unemployment skyrockets, suicide rates are likely to rise as well. Furthermore, if “extreme social distancing” is kept in place for as long as the Liberals are saying is necessary – months rather than weeks – there will be a general breakdown in psychological and emotional health. Human beings are social creatures. They are not meant to live apart from each other. Force them to live contrary to their nature for a lengthy period of time and they will start to go bonkers. This too would contribute to a rise in suicide rates as well as other dangerous and destructive behaviour.

Furthermore, just as an extended shut down will rapidly burn up accumulated material capital, so an extensive period of “extreme social distancing” will burn up social capital – the trust between members of a community and society that enables them to function in a civilized way and cooperate for their own common good. The only kind of government that would want to destroy that is a totalitarian government that hates and persecutes all social interaction that is not under its direct planning and control, which demands the total undivided allegiance of its citizens, and which fears any and all rivals for its peoples’ loyalty, trust, and affection.

Those who would rather not live under that kind of a government, who still value our constitution in which Queen-in-Parliament and not Prime Minister-in-Council is sovereign, and our Common Law rights and freedoms won a victory today. Let us practice eternal vigilance and pray that it is not short-lived.

 
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sensible and Sane, Albeit a Century Old, Words from the Left on Immigration

Posted on by

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Sunday, August 5, 2018

Sensible and Sane, Albeit a Century Old, Words from the Left on Immigration

I am, as you may be aware, neither a fan nor a friend of either liberalism or the left. If forced to choose between the two, I would pick the classical, nineteenth century, form of liberalism – individual rights, economic freedom, limits on government – over the left any day, but my instincts have always been conservative, that is to say, inclined towards order, tradition, and institutions that have been tested, proven, and honoured by time. A Tory is a specific kind of conservative, for whom the most cherished of time-honoured institutions are royal monarchy in the political sphere and the Apostolic Church in the religious sphere. Politically, I have been a Tory all my life, and as my theology has developed in a high church direction over the years, I have become so religiously as well. Unlike liberalism and leftism, neither conservatism nor Toryism, properly understood, is an ideology – a formula that purports to provide the political solution to all our problems. Indeed, the conservative and Tory are fundamentally anti-ideological, respecting the lesson of the past, that institutions, tested and proved by time, are to be trusted, over the formulations of intellectuals, however well-intentioned, for these never deliver the Paradise on earth they promise and more often than not do a great deal of harm in the name of doing good.

The non-ideological bent of the conservative and Tory allows him both to reject the foolishness and nonsense of liberalism and the left and to acknowledge the rare occasion when an idea coming from those quarters has merit. While, as indicated above, in my eyes nineteenth century liberalism produced more such ideas than any form of leftism then or since, I believe in giving credit where credit is due. While I disagreed with the late editor of Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn on the vast majority of matters, I thought he was dead on right when it came to his opposition to American military interventionism in the Balkans and the Middle East. The late Gore Vidal had a lot of sensible things to say on such matters as well. Although I don’t agree with much that Noam Chomsky has to say when it comes to politics, his analysis of how the mass media shapes and limits thought in democratic societies is essential reading and I have always respected the consistency of his stand for free speech. Whereas most liberals and leftists switch from free speech mode, when they are defending subversives and terrorists, to become censorious witch hunters when anyone touches their sacred cow, the Holocaust, Chomsky, a consistent advocate of free speech, defended French professor Robert Faurisson, braving the wrath of loud mouthed fools on both the left and right to do so.

Admittedly, I find it easier to give credit to leftists for good ideas when those ideas are left over from a Tory upbringing. The Honourable Eugene A. Forsey, although raised a MacDonald-Meighan Conservative, was for the most part of his life a man of the left, a social democrat who, before accepting a seat in the Senate as a Liberal, had worked for both the labour movement and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Despite this, and through all of this, he remained a man of deep Christian principles, and a patriotic defender of our country’s constitution, parliamentary monarchy, Common Law legal system, and traditional heritage and symbols, for which I admire and respect him. Other prominent Canadian social democrats who to one degree or another shared Forsey’s residual conservatism included Tommy Douglas, Stanley Knowles, and even, at least on the point of the monarchy, the late Jack Layton.

I say all of this by way of introduction to the following essay, which looks at an early twentieth-century leader of the Canadian left, who expressed sensible views that are completely verboten among the left of the present day, on the subject of immigration. Consider this quotation:

When it has become necessary in the United States to form an Immigration Restriction League, it is surely high time that we examined closely the character of our immigration, and shut out those whose presence will not make for the welfare of our national life.

These words are the opening paragraph to chapter twenty-one, entitled “Restriction of Immigration”, in Strangers Within Our Gates: Or Coming Canadians, originally published in 1909, the author of which was the Rev. James Shaver Woodsworth, a Methodist minister who at the time was superintendent of All People’s Mission in Winnipeg, an outreach ministry that worked with the poor and especially new immigrants. Woodsworth would later be elected to Parliament as the representative of Winnipeg North. He ran as a socialist, initially for the Independent Labour Party, later for the CCF of which he was the first leader. The CCF was a party that combined prairie populism with social democracy, and which was undergirded by the theology of the Social Gospel. While that theology is not sound from the perspective of historical, traditional, and Scriptural orthodoxy, the CCF outlook was much to be preferred over the hard-left, secular Marxist, ultra-politically correct perspective of its successor, today’s NDP.

Woodsworth went on in the next paragraph to quote approvingly two American Presidents, including Roosevelt (Theodore) who said “We cannot have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind. The need is to devise some system by which undesirable immigrants shall be kept out entirely while desirable immigrants are properly distributed throughout the country.”

Can you imagine Jagmeet Singh or anyone in the party he leads quoting anything that sensible approvingly today?

Woodsworth contrasted the way Canada “eager to secure immigrants, has adopted the system of giving bonuses” with the way the United States “levies a head tax that more than defrays the cost of inspection.” In other words, we were paying for our immigration, the United States was making it pay for itself. He then quoted extensively from the Immigration Act of 1906, specifically clauses 26 through 33. Clauses 26 through 29 prohibited the immigration of anyone who “is feeble-minded, an idiot, or an epileptic, or who is insane, or who has had an attack of insanity within five years…is deaf and dumb, blind or infirm, unless he belongs to a family accompanying him or already in Canada”, “who is afflicted with a loathsome disease, or with a disease which is contagious or infectious, and which may become dangerous to the public health or widely disseminated”, “who is a pauper, or destitute, a professional beggar, or vagrant, or who is likely to become a public charge”, “ who has been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude, or who is a prostitute, or who procures, or brings or attempts to bring into Canada prostitutes or women for purposes of prostitution.” Clause 30 authorized the Governor-in-Council to further prohibit “any special class of immigrants” when deemed necessary, and clauses 31 to 33 specify the procedures whereby all of this is to be enforced. After quoting all of this material Woodsworth commented:

No one will quarrel with the provisions of this Act, but it should go further, and provision should be made for more strict enforcement.

Among his suggestions for improving the Act, are the prohibition of other classes that were then barred from immigrating to the United States – “polygamists; anarchists, or persons who believe in, or advocate, the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States, or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials” etc., – and “the prohibition or careful selection of assisted immigrants.” Take note of the latter, which he says “is of the greatest importance.” Rather than prohibit or carefully select assisted immigrants, the new immigration regulations of 1967 do the exact opposite of this and make the sponsorship of immigrants into a backdoor by which the requirements of the points system that these regulations introduced can be bypassed altogether.

As far as provision “for more strict enforcement” goes, Woodsworth says the following:

The trouble is that we are working at the wrong end. The examination in every case should be not at the ports of entry, but at the ports from which the immigrants sail – or better still at the homes from which they come. Such a course would be at once kinder to the immigrants and much safer for our country…Again, the examination where the people are known is the only effective method. Diseased, paupers, criminals, prostitutes and undesirables generally are known in their home neighborhood…The Canadian Government should insist on the immigrant presenting a satisfactory certificate from the Government officials of his own country. If the foreign governments would not co-operate, if they are too despotic or corrupt to make such an arrangement practicable, then we should appoint our own agents in Europe who would make most thorough investigation.

As with the careful selection of assisted immigrants, a major problem with the post-1967 immigration system is that we have gone in the exact opposite direction of what Woodworth proposed. Until then, a prospective immigrant had to go to a Canadian visa officer in one of our embassies, consulates, or High commissions abroad, and apply from outside of Canada. In October of 1967, a regulation was passed waiving this requirement and allowing legal visitors to Canada to apply from within the country. Charles M. Campbell, who served on the Immigration Appeal Board for ten years, eight as vice-chairman, explained that this, together with the establishment of the Immigration Appeal Board and the right to appeal a negative decision, led to the situation in the early 1970s where the system was completely swamped. Since this change had been made by regulation and was not part of an actual Immigration Act it was easily repealed in 1973, about the time that the Liberal government passed a general amnesty to deal with the backlog. It was only on paper, however, that we went back to the old rules. Today, the right to apply from within Canada is supposedly limited to select groups, like spouses of Canadians, but in reality, this is nullified both by the absurdity that “outland applications” can be made from within Canada and by the policy of making broad exceptions for “humanitarian and compassionate” reasons.

Woodsworth’s ideas would make him persona non grata today in the successor to the party he once led, as well as in the Green, Liberal, and, sadly, Conservative Parties. They are, however, basic plain sense. Governments are established for the common good of the countries they govern, not for the common good of all people, everywhere. Until quite recently, only American liberals with their naïve notion of their republic as the “first universal nation” were foolish enough to think otherwise. Governments, therefore, owe it to the countries they govern, and the people who already live in those countries, to be selective as to who they let in. It is their duty, not just their right, to allow desirable immigrants in and keep undesirables out. Those who disagree with this will try to argue that “desirable” and “undesirable” are entirely subjective and based upon irrational prejudice, but it is pretty obvious that the classes Woodsworth speaks of as undesirable – those who are subversive of government, law and order, criminals, or who because of poverty or mental or physical conditions are more likely to be public expenses than contributors – are objectively undesirable from the standpoint of a government looking out for its nation’s interests.

Today, the first, and usually only, response of the liberal-left to those who call for selective, restrictive, immigration that lets the desirables in but keeps the undesirables out is “racist.” This is their response even if the immigration restrictionist has gone out of his way to avoid bringing race, ethnicity, and culture into his arguments. Rev. Woodsworth had the following to say about this aspect of the immigration question, speaking specifically to immigration from Asia:

The advocates for admission argue that we ought not to legislate against a particular class or nation, and that the Orientals are needed to develop the resources of the country. Their opponents believe that white laborers cannot compete with Orientals, that the standard of living will be lowered, and white men driven out, and they claim that a nation has the right to protect itself… Perhaps, for some time, the presence of a limited number of Orientals may be advantageous. But it does seem that the exclusionists are right in their contention that laborers working and living as the Orientals do, will displace European laborers. It is generally agreed that the two races are not likely to ‘mix.’ Ultimately, then, the question resolves itself into the desirability of a white caste and a yellow, or black caste, existing side by side, or above and below, in the same country. We confess that the idea of a homogenous people seems in accord with our democratic institutions and conducive to the general welfare. This need not exclude small communities of black or red or yellow peoples. It is well to remember that we are not the only people on earth. The idealist may still dream of a final state of development, when white and black and red and yellow shall have ceased to exist, or have become merged into some neutral gray. We may love all men, and yet prefer to maintain our family life.

These words, written a hundred and ten years ago by the man who went on to lead the Canadian left for the first half of the twentieth century, would immediately bring down the charge of racism upon their author’s head today. Thirty years ago, the ideas contained in those words were enough to get people kicked out of the Reform Party of Canada, and indeed, as far back as 1972, when the University of Toronto Press put out the reprint edition that I have been quoting, they saw a need to stick an introduction by Marilyn Barber, explaining away Woodsworth as a product of his times.

While there are those who would say that this is a positive development, showing that we have come a long way as a society, and are so much more enlightened now than we were a century ago, the reality is that accusations of racism have, since the late 1960s, been primarily a means for stifling discussion, discouraging rational thought, and silencing dissent to ideas that could not bear up under scrutiny for a second.

Is it racist to take questions of race, culture, nationality, religion, and ethnicity into consideration in selecting immigrants?

Before giving the knee-jerk answer of “yes”, note that there is more than one way in which these questions can be taken into consideration. A government could make it its policy to preserve its country’s ethnic status quo and so refuse to admit immigrants that would alter that status quo. A government could make it its policy to ignore these matters altogether in selecting immigrants. A third possibility is that a government could make it its policy to deliberately and radically alter its country’s ethnic status quo by discriminating in favour of immigrants who differ from the majority of its population and bringing as many of them in as fast as it possibly can. Let us call these Options 1, 2, and 3.

Option 2 is the only policy that is racially and ethnically neutral. It is, therefore, the least susceptible to the charge of being racist. Option 1 is the policy that is most frequently condemned as racist. Of the two non-racially neutral policies, however, it is the only one that can be defended morally. The known negative effects of altering a country’s ethnic status quo include a weakening of social cohesion and communal feeling, a decrease in confidence in one’s neighbours, fellow citizens, government, and society, and, perhaps ironically, an increase in racial and ethnic negative feeling, hostility and strife. When, just over ten years ago, Harvard political scientist, Robert D. Putnam, published a paper, originally a lecture, that interpreted data that he had gathered in a study on the relationship between diversity and social capital as saying that “In the short run…immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital” and that in diverse neighbourhoods “residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’” and that “Trust, (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer,” he was not telling us anything that had not already been known and recognized from time immemorial. If you introduce one or two newcomers into a homogenous community who differ from the majority ethnically, they may indeed have the much lauded effect of improving the community in the way that is often expressed in the cooking metaphor of adding flavor or spice. This effect decreases, however, in inverse proportion, as the diversity increases. There is a relatively low saturation point – decades ago, Daniel Cappon of York University’s Department of Environmental Studies told the Globe and Mail that the “critical mass” was ten percent – beyond which, the negative effects of ethnic diversification take over. The larger the change and the faster it is accomplished the greater will be these negative effects. The wish to avoid these negative effects is sufficient reason and justification for Option 1, the policy of preserving the status quo. It requires neither irrational racial prejudice nor some ideological notion of racial purity – just plain, old-fashioned, sense.

Over the course of her history, the government of the Dominion of Canada has gone through three basic phases with regards to these policy options. From 1867 to 1962, Option 1 was reflected in federal immigration policy. This was true regardless of which party was in power, Conservative or Liberals, and, as we have seen, it had a supporter in the first leader of the CCF as well. In 1962, Ellen Fairclough the Minister of Immigration in the Cabinet of the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker, introduced what was basically a combination of Options 1 and 2. Racial, cultural, and ethnic preferences were eliminated for individuals applying to immigrate to Canada, but the rules which prohibited people from countries other than traditional source countries from sponsoring their extended families were retained. This reflected the thinking of the Prime Minister at the time, who wanted to be fair and non-discriminatory to individuals, Option 2, without radically changing the country’s demographics, Option 1. This, arguably the best of the phases, was also the most short-lived. It lasted until 1966-1967. In 1966 the Liberal government put out a White Paper recommending a new Immigration Act that would radically overhaul the immigration system. In October of the following year that overhaul took place, albeit through a change of regulations by Order-in-Council, as Diefenbaker’s changes had been, rather than through the new Immigration Act, which came nine years later. Thus began the phase of practicing Option 3 while pretending that it is Option 2 that has continued to this day. If Diefenbaker’s policy combined the first two options in the best possible way, this was and is the worst possible combination.

Here is how this was accomplished. The new regulations in October 1967, first, established the points system by which individuals now apply to immigrate to Canada, and second, eliminated the remaining racial and cultural restrictions so that everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, and culture could sponsor the same number and range of relatives. On paper, this looks like pure Option 2. The points-system, on its own merits, is quite fair. The prospective immigrant is awarded points towards entry for his ability to speak English and/or French, his level of education, his skilled experience in a trade for which there is a need of labourers, his age (maximum points for 21-49), his having an offer of employment in Canada, and miscellaneous similar factors. The problem is that two large back doors were put in place by which the points system can be bypassed. This is how Option 3 was snuck in and disguised as Option 2.

One of those backdoors is the sponsorship of relatives. Assisted or sponsored relatives, do not have to meet the strict requirements of the points system like individuals who apply on their own merits. In traditional source countries, the trend for the last couple of centuries has been towards the small, nuclear, model of the family. Couples have fewer children than before, and their ties to extended family – relatives beyond the nuclear model – are much weaker than they were before the Second World War, let alone prior to the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, in non-traditional source countries, the tendency is still towards large families, with many children, and strong, binding, ties to the extended family. This is not said by way of criticism of those cultures. Indeed, as I have argued in the past, in the modern transition to the nuclear model we can see the early stages of the social unravelling of the West and the “war on the family.” The point is that people from non-traditional source countries will be far more likely to want to bring a huge number of relatives over with them than people from traditional source countries, and both the Diefenbaker Conservatives and the Pearson-Trudeau Liberals, knew this. This is why the former, not wanting the country to be radically and rapidly transformed, retained racial and cultural restrictions on sponsoring relatives when they removed the other racial and cultural preferences. This is why the later, removed those restrictions. It is not that they wanted to be fully racially and ethnically neutral in their policy. They wanted to make Canada as diverse as they could, as fast as they could – Option 3 – while pretending to be neutral – Option 2. When they passed their new Immigration Act in 1976, the emphasis was on “family reunification”, by which wording Canadians were sold a bill of goods. A streamlined immigration application process for the purpose of family reunification makes sense when we are talking about bringing in the spouses and children of Canadians who have married abroad. What the Trudeau Liberals meant by it was making it easier and quicker for people from the Third World to bring their entire extended families into the country so as to change the country’s demographics – or, as the Liberals themselves put it, “change the face of Canada” – as fast as possible. This is not a racially neutral policy, nor is it a policy that has Canada’s interests at heart.

Remember that Rev. Woodworth said that “the prohibition or careful selection of assisted immigrants is of the greatest importance.”

The other backdoor is the refugee system. We had foolishly signed the United Nations’ Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, giving that body, established by an evil and insane American President as a monument to his own ego, the General Assembly of which exists only to provide a soapbox for the voices of every tin-pot dictatorship, military junta, kleptocracy, and failed state on the planet, the Security Council of which exists merely to rubber stamp the decisions of the American government, the right to dictate our refugee policy. Unlike the other signers, however, we have used the Convention as an excuse to make ourselves the laughing stock of the world, by pretending that illegal aliens are asylum seekers who have a “right” to cross our borders without going through the proper channels, and accepting a high percentage of “self-selected” refugees, of whom only a very small percentage are actually fleeing for their lives. Chapter seven, “How Canada Fails Refugees”, of Toronto writer, Daniel Stoffman’s, Who Gets In, is a must read on this matter. Stoffman shows how our corrupt refugee system, which primarily serves to line the pockets of immigration and refugee lawyers, actually makes it harder for real refugees to get in, by showing preference for the fakes and frauds. Reforms were made after this book was published but these all went out the window when Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in 2015 and the system is now worse than it ever was before. Trudeau, a supporter of the previous American administration’s policy of intervention in Syria that produced a Civil War that has killed half a million people and displaced millions of others, insists that we have a responsibility to bring those who have been displaced over here. Sensible people would question the sanity of bringing thousands of people, whom you have helped murder and displace with your irresponsible interventionism, and who would have cause to hold a grudge against you even if they were not predominantly of a religion in which holy war is one of the core tenets, over to live in your own country. Especially, when you promise to bring them over in such large numbers and such a short period of time that you cannot possibly vet them properly. The folly of all of this has been matched only by its corruption – the Trudeau government did not go to actual refugee camps to find the “asylum seekers” it brought over, but rather found the majority of them in apartment buildings in cities in Turkey, Jordan, Oman, and Lebanon where they had been living for years and bribed them to come over and get their picture taken with Trudeau before being put into refugee camps here!

Through these two large back doors, Option 3 became Canada’s official immigration policy, under the guise of practicing Option 2. While it was the Pearson-Trudeau Liberals who started this, it has remained the policy of our government ever since, even in the periods in which the Mulroney and Harper Conservatives were in power. That Option 3 was intentional on the part of the Grits is evident from the results. At the start of Pierre Trudeau’s premiership, English Canadians, French Canadians, and white ethnics, taken together, compromised over 95% of Canada’s population. If trends continue, they will be a minority in Canada in 2050. A change that large does not happen that fast unintentionally. Perhaps those who introduced this phase of Canadian immigration policy did not foresee the scale of the change but demographic transformation was their intention.

This policy has never been popular. Polls conducted, from the beginning of this phase until the present day, have shown that the majority of Canadians do not and have never wanted immigration that radically changes the ethnic makeup of the country. Now, let me be clear, the modern democratic dogma that “the majority is always right” is false – it would be more accurate to say the majority is usually wrong – and government has a duty to do what is right, even when this is not what the majority wants. In this case, however, majority opinion corresponds with what we know to be true about large scale, rapid, demographic transformation being bad for established communities and countries, and the reason for this correspondence is clear – the majority are those who have to live, every day, with the results of immigration policy, whereas the politicians who make that policy, and their academic and media supporters, have largely isolated themselves from the consequences of their ideas, living in controlled, largely homogenous, communities, just as they have isolated themselves from all criticism of their ideas, by shrieking “racist” whenever anyone questions – or even dares to take notice of – the transformation that is quickly taking place before their very eyes.

Today, the Canadian left is all on board the “let’s make Canada as diverse as we can, as fast as we can” train, even though the brunt of the negative consequences must be borne by working class Canadians, the poor, and basically all those for whom the left until fairly recently professed to speak. The Canadian left of the twenty-first century would have no room for the likes of the Reverend J. S. Woodsworth. Indeed, if he were still ministering in the Winnipeg of the current year, expressing the same views as he did in 1909, in all likelihood Mayor Duckie would wring his hands in despair and order a police investigation, Helmut-Harry Loewen would seize the opportunity to get his name in the newspapers on a regular basis by warning of the imminent threat he posed, David Matas would consider initiating legal proceedings against the “Hitler of the North End” on behalf of Binai B’rith, and the ironically-if-unawarely-named Fascist Free Treaty One would seek to prevent his views from being heard through crude intimidation tactics, whereas I, on the other hand, would find myself in the odd and unusual position, of having to cheer the old socialist on.

Works Referenced

Charles M. Campbell, Betrayal & Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration, West Vancouver, Jasmine Books, 2000.

Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program – and how to fix it, Toronto, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002.

J. S. Woodsworth, Strangers Within Our Gate: Or Coming Canadians, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972 (original edition 1909)

Posted by at 3:58 AM

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,