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The Dominion of Canada – An Annotated Bibliography

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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

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Erin is a Tool: The Conservative Party’s Latest Quisling Leader

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Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Saturday, January 23, 2021

Erin is a Tool: The Conservative Party’s Latest Quisling Leader

The last time the old Conservative Party was led by someone whose political philosophy I would feel comfortable acknowledging as my own was almost a decade before my birth.  The Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, who became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party when it was in Opposition in 1956, led it to victory (a minority government) in the 1957 Dominion election, shortly before winning the party’s largest majority in percentage of seats ever the following year.   Reduced to a minority government again in 1962, Diefenbaker’s government fell in 1963 when Tommy Douglas’ socialists and the right-wing Social Credit Party both supported Liberal leader Lester Pearson when he called for a vote of no confidence because of Diefenbaker’s refusal to allow Washington D. C. to dictate policy in Ottawa on the matter of the nuclear arming of the Bomarc missiles.  

Pearson, who had betrayed his country to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union when he was attached to our Washington embassy in World War II (see the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley before the American House of Un-American Activities Committee), and betrayed the entire Commonwealth to both the Soviets and the Americans when he sided with these powers against the alliance of Britain, France, and Israel in 1957 as a Minister in the government of Louis St. Laurent, was here acting on behalf of John F. Kennedy’s government in the United States.   Diefenbaker continued to lead the party in Opposition for the next four years, which saw the shining moment of his entire career, when he led the Conservatives in fierce opposition to the new flag of 1965, the first major step taken by the Liberals during the long period in which they were led by Lester Pearson and his successor Pierre Trudeau to radically re-invent the country, and strip it of the most visible symbols of its Loyalist heritage and identity.   In 1967, Diefenbaker was replaced by Robert Stanfield as party leader in a leadership convention that was the culmination of two years’ worth of effort on the part of Dalton Camp, then the party president (which is not the same thing as party leader) to oust him.

While I admit that Diefenbaker’s performance in the office of Prime Minister was far less stellar than his performance in the office of Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, his political philosophy was what I admire most about him.  He was a fierce defender of Canada’s Loyalist history and heritage, the traditional institutions derived from these such as the monarchy, Parliament, and the Common Law, and the symbols of all of these, such as the old flag.   While most if not all of his successors have paid lip service to much of this, it has never been with his passion.  He opposed all threats to Canadian freedom, whether it was the external threat posed by increasing American cultural and economic influence – or, as in the case of the Bomarc missiles incident, political influence – or the internal threat posed by the subversion of Parliamentary tradition, the exponential growth of the civil service, and the alarming way in which the government was increasingly treating the latter as a means of bypassing the former to govern by bureaucratic regulation rather than Parliamentary legislation.   His views are best stated in his own words in the speeches collected in his Those Things We Treasure (1972).  

This book and John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (1956 – posthumously edited by Judith Robinson) are the two classic texts of the political philosophy associated with the old Conservative Party from Sir John A. MacDonald to John G. Diefenbaker, a Canadian version of classical British Toryism.  Sadly both books have been out-of-print for years, although Diefenbaker’s has been fairly easily and inexpensively obtainable through used-book stores.   (I first obtained a copy from Black’s Vintage Books in Winnipeg, sadly no longer around, when I was still a theology student in college.   I had to send away for Farthing’s book when my attention was drawn to it by Ron Dart several years later.)   The classic text of the religious philosophy underlying this political philosophy, expressed as a jeremiad over the latter’s failure, was George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965), which remains in print.

After Diefenbaker was ousted, the leadership of the Progressive Conservative fell alternately to people who were more-or-less socialists in Conservative garb, like Stanfield, and had little-to-no problem with increasing bureaucratization and its threat to Canadian freedom, or to people who were basically big business liberals in Conservative garb, like Brian Mulroney, who promoted free trade with the United States, which throughout Canadian history had been a Liberal Party policy, and who had little-to-no problem with increasing American economic and cultural influence over Canada.     It was while Stanfield led the party that a “conservative movement” outside of the party began to form to oppose what Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals were doing and lobby for conservative causes, obviously because it was felt that the Party was failing to do this.    While the organizations and publications that made up this movement fought for good things for the most part – to give one example, Colin Brown founded the National Citizens Coalition in 1975 to fight for government fiscal accountability against Trudeau’s huge deficits – it lamentably tended to ignore the classical texts of Canadian Toryism mentioned in the previous paragraph and look for inspiration to the American conservative movement.   

This led to a blindness in the Mulroney years.   They could perceive that Mulroney had little interest in combatting the sweeping social, moral, and cultural changes that were quickly being introduced as a result of Pierre Trudeau’s having given the Supreme Court powers similar to its American counterpart by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the constitution (although to give credit where credit is due Mulroney was the last Conservative leader to attempt to pass legislation restricting abortion after the newly empowered Court struck the existing laws down in 1988) and thus in that sense was way too far to the Left like Stanfield,  but failed to recognize that the problem stemmed from unnaturally grafting an element of the American republican system onto our system of Crown-in-Parliament where it neither belongs nor fits (a mistake Tony Blair would later make in the United Kingdom) and to see Mulroney’s reversal of traditional Conservative opposition to free trade with the United States for the betrayal it was.   It was during the Mulroney years that the conservative movement allied itself with a populism that had been growing in the Western prairie provinces in response to the exceedingly arrogant way in which they had been treated by Ottawa under Trudeau and how Mulroney had offered little in the way of redress.   Together they formed a new party, the Reform Party of Canada.

This was not the first time conservatism and populism had been united in Canadian history.    John G. Diefenbaker, as explained above, was the last Conservative leader to fully represent in a way that did more than lip service, authentic traditional Canadian Toryism, but he was also a prairie populist reformer, a role that arose naturally out of his early career as a defence lawyer in Saskatchewan.   W. L. Morton, who was head of the history department at the University of Manitoba and the author of the Kingdom of Canada and a Canadian historian second only to Donald Creighton was, like Creighton, a traditional Tory, and, unlike Creighton, a strong advocate for fairer representation of the West in the Dominion government.   Diefenbaker and Morton, however, combined traditional Toryism with Western populism.   The Reform Party combined a neoconservatism that looked for inspiration to the United States with Western populism and this was not a good mix.   Ironically, they gave their party what had originally been the Confederation era name of their despised foe, the Liberals.   Also ironic, but in a less amusing way, their dividing the right-of-centre vote with the Progressive Conservatives kept the Liberals in government from 1993 to 2005.

Realizing that their division would only keep the Liberals in perpetual power, the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party began “Unite the Right” discussions in the late 1990, partially merging into the Canadian Alliance in 2000 and then fully uniting into the present Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.  They have had four leaders since then.   The first of these was Stephen Harper, who became Prime Minister with a minority government in 2006, won a majority government in 2011, and served as Prime Minister until 2015.   When Captain Airhead led the Liberals back into government in the Dominion election of that year, Harper stepped down, was briefly replaced by Rona Ambrose as an interim leader, before Andrew Scheer was chosen as the next leader.   Scheer performed incredibly poorly in that role, being initially too cautious as Opposition Leader, then essentially throwing away an election that was practically being handed to him by Captain Airhead with his self-destructive heaping of scandals upon scandals, with his, that is Scheer’s, one shining moment coming in March of last year, when he resolutely opposed the Liberals’ attempt to use the pandemic to escape Parliamentary oversight for two years.   At this point, however, it was too late to salvage Scheer’s leadership, and Erin O’Toole was chosen as the next leader.

Erin O’Toole has now set the record for the shortest time it has ever taken for a Conservative leader to so disgust me that I vowed never to vote for anyone in the party as long as he led it.   It took Stephen Harper until the last year of his premiership, when he introduced legislation to enhance the powers of government to invade the privacy of Canadians and spy on them, to do that.   Erin O’Toole has not even been leader for a full five months yet and he has already managed to do so.

On Monday O’Toole announced that he would be seeking to kick Derek Sloan out of the party caucus.   Sloan is the Member who represents the Upper Canada riding of Hastings-Lennox and Addington in the House of Commons.   Although he is a quite young MP – he is in his mid-thirties and was elected for the first time in the Dominion election of two years ago – he was one of O’Toole’s rivals in the leadership race last year.   He had become a target of the Left earlier that year when he asked the question of whether Theresa Tam, the federal chief medical mandarin, was working for Canada or China.  The Left assumed this to be a racist question based upon Tam’s ethnicity, although the question naturally arises out of the possible conflict of interests between her position in Canada and her role in the World Health Organization over which Red China has held an inordinate amount of influence, especially under its current director.   Sloan, a Seventh Day Adventist, is also a strong social conservative who opposes abortion, gender-identity discrimination legislation, and the Liberal government’s current attempts to ban conversion therapy.   O’Toole’s announcement was based upon the revelation that Sloan had received a donation from Paul Fromm.   On Wednesday the party voted to expel Sloan from the caucus.

Sloan’s response to this, appropriately, was to call out O’Toole for his blatant unfairness and hypocrisy.   Sloan could not have been reasonably expected to have known that the donation came from Paul Fromm since he had used his first name, Frederick, in making it, nor, would I add, is it reasonable in a free country to expect people who receive donations to vet their donors to make sure they are not guilty of some sort of crimethink.   That is the unfairness – the hypocrisy is in the fact that the party took a cut from the same donation and had sold a membership to the donor. 

This incident illustrates the biggest problem I have with the post-Diefenbaker leadership of the Conservative Party whether of the Left-leaning Stanfield variety or the American neo-liberal Mulroney variety.   They have all been terrified of being labelled “Far Right” and since they have allowed the Liberals and the socialists to define the “Far Right” and attach this label to whomever they wish without serious challenge, this has meant that they have allowed the Liberals and the socialists to dictate the acceptable parameters of thought within their own party.   Back in the period alluded to earlier, when discontent with the performance of the Progressive Conservatives had led to the creation of first a conservative movement and then the Reform Party of Canada, Dalton Camp, the party official who had orchestrated the backstabbing of Diefenbaker, was a regular commentator on the CBC.   He was frequently part of a panel with Erik Kierens of the Liberals and Stephen Lewis of the NDP as the Conservative representative to create the false impression of balanced commentary (like Kierens he very much represented the Left wing of his own party).  

Camp shared with his Liberal and NDP colleagues an abhorrence of social conservatism or “the Religious Right” as he called it, and regarded the phenomenon as both an import from the United States and the next thing to fascism.   This was utter nonsense, of course – most of the things that the Religious Right railed against – abortion on demand, the relaxing of laws and liberalization of attitudes towards sexual morality, the driving of the Bible and Lord’s Prayer out of schools – came to Canada much later than they did to the United States and consequently what social conservatives wish to return to had remained the status quo here much longer and had been the status quo much more recently(1).    Indeed, the first issue in the Culture War between the Left and the Religious Right in which the Left’s triumph in Canada preceded its victory in the United States was same-sex marriage, and Camp could hardly have claimed the Religious Right’s stance on this issue as an American import because he died of complications from a stroke the year prior to the first court-ordered alteration to the status quo of 1 man + 1 woman = marriage and three years before the Liberals introduced the bill in Parliament that generalized the change.    The leadership of the Conservative Party, however, was terrified of the accusations coming from the Liberals, the NDP, the Left-dominated mainstream media, and their own Dalton Camp, that the social conservative ideas of  the conservative movement and the new Reform Party were dangerously” Far Right”.

That by taking this stance they were helping to move the centre of the Canadian mainstream dangerously close to the “Far Left” never seemed to occur to them.

Everything I have just said with regards to the social, moral, and religious issues of the Culture War also applies to the issues pertaining to immigration, nationality, and race except that with these issues, the Progressive Conservative Party leadership was even quicker to concede to the Liberals and to the Left the right to define a consensus and the acceptable parameters containing that consensus from which all dissent would be excluded. The capitulation was more complete.   Furthermore, the leadership  of the Reform Party joined in this concession with regards to these issues.

What is the consensus that the Liberals and their further-to-the-Left allies, given this free reign, imposed upon Canada?

It amounts to this: if you are white, discriminating against someone who is not is about the worst thing you could do, and the law must protect others against your discrimination by giving the government the power to punish you with complete and total economic and social destruction, but you yourself must have no protection under law against discrimination, because you, being white, are incapable of being discriminated against, and if you complain about or even notice the unfairness of this then you are an evil, prejudiced bigot, a racist, a Nazi, who must either be re-programmed or completely excluded from society.

The Liberal Party worked hard at establishing this double standard which is utterly repugnant morally and completely indefensible intellectually as consensus, or rather state-imposed dogma,  during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.   In 1970 Parliament passed a bill introduced while Pearson was Prime Minister that added sections 318-320 to the Criminal Code which created several new offences each having to do in some way with “hate propaganda”.   This was entirely unnecessary because anything criminalized by these sections that really ought to be against the law was already against the existing laws against inciting crime and violence.   The existing laws were superior in every way because they protected all Canadians alike.   In 1977, Trudeau’s Liberals rammed the Canadian Human Rights Act through Parliament.   Despite the title, this bill had nothing to do with ensuring that such basic rights as life, liberty, and property were guaranteed to all people in Canada or in protecting anybody in Canada from the abuse by the state that is the first thing that pops into most people’s minds upon hearing “human rights violations”.   The Act was entirely about dictating to Canadians that they could not discriminate against each other on the grounds of race, sex, etc. in their private lives.   It established an investigatory body to look into accusations of discrimination, and a tribunal to hear the charges.   Since it is considered “civil law”, the accused are denied the rights they would have as defendants under criminal law.   The reality, however, is that it punishes the “crime” of wrongthink.   Although the law is written in such a way as to make the offence reside in the act of discriminating rather than the race/sex/whatever of the complainant and the accused so that in theory, the white person turned down from a job by an employer who only hires people from his own Asian or African nationality ought to have just as strong a case as someone in the reverse situation, that is not how it works in practice.   The Commission that investigates and the Tribunal that hears these cases operate on an Animal Farm, “some animals are more equal than others” basis, which is, of course, how the Trudeau Liberals instructed them to operate from the beginning.   In the few instances when anybody has ever bothered to question the uneven way in which this law is administered, the answer has always been to point back to the intent behind the law, to protect “vulnerable minorities”.    It is, of course, incredibly bad practice to allow the intent behind a law that is worded in such a way as to suggest that it protects everybody from racial discrimination to overrule the wording and turn it into a law that protects people from some races and not others, but then, the law itself is bad because it unnecessarily extends government control into the private lives of Canadians to the point of telling them what they can and cannot be thinking when interacting with others when all that was really called for was for the government to lead by example in not practicing colour discrimination itself.   That, however, would have required going back to the policies of John G. Diefenbaker, the Conservative Prime Minister who  militantly opposed racism and whose vision for the Dominion of Canada was one of national unity, which he believed in so strongly that he made it the title of his three volume memoir One Canada, instead of following the bad example of the Americans, who at least had the sense to call their earlier and equivalent law a “Civil Rights Act”. 

The protecting “vulnerable minorities” justification for all this bad legislation and practice has grown in its rhetorical force from then until now and Pierre Trudeau’s foul offspring has just trotted it out again in support of his upcoming efforts to seize even more control over what Canadians are allowed to think and communicate to each other.   Its rhetorical force should have shrunk.   At the time it was first evoked, 96% of Canadians were white.   This is no longer the case today, indeed, we are at the point where whites becoming a minority is on the near horizon, but the voices from the Left telling us that everybody else belongs to a “vulnerable” or “disadvantaged” minority that needs increased government protection against whites are becoming louder, more stringent and more hysterical by the day.   Don’t expect  those same voices to come to the defence of whites when they become a minority and one far more vulnerable than any other in Canada has ever been due to decades of this anti-white propaganda.   The demographic transformation just alluded to is the direct result of immigration changes introduced by Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.   I don’t mean the points system introduced by Order-in-Council in 1967.   It is itself an admirable and fair way of processing applications based upon individual merit, although the Pearson Liberals do not deserve the credit for eliminating racial discrimination from immigration policy that the Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History – what Donald Creighton dubbed “the Authorized Version” – assigns them because Diefenbaker had already done that in 1962.   I refer rather to a number of changes introduced quietly, unannounced, and with no fanfare, whereby the civil servants charged with processing applications were told to give priority to applications from non-traditional source countries over those from traditional source countries with the result that “traditional Euro-British sources of immigration were effectively shut off in favour of migrants and their extended families from the Third World” (Kenneth McDonald, A Wind in the Heath: A Memoir, Epic Press, 2003).  

Instead of opposing all of this, as they ought to have done, the Progressive Conservatives whether the socialist Stanfield types, the moderate Joe Clark types, or the neo-liberal Brian Mulroney types embraced it.   Indeed, when Brian Mulroney took over the leadership of the party he basically sent out the message that opposition to the Trudeau agenda on these issues would not be tolerated and that discrimination against whites would be continued.   As Prime Minister, in fact, he set out to out-Trudeau Trudeau himself with regards to immigration.   Perhaps some of the Conservative leader were dense enough to think that Pearson and Trudeau had been continuing Diefenbaker’s “One Canada” vision rather than subverting and inverting it.   For the most part, however, they were terrified of being labelled “Far Right” by the Liberals and the press.   The Liberals, in the Pearson-Trudeau period had attempted the frighten the public into accepting their measures as necessary to fight a non-existent “Far Right” threat, by creating a fake “Canadian Nazi Party”, which their media allies then splashed all over the headlines and the television news.   The Mulroney Conservatives, having received the message, proceeded to pass it on when they gained competition for the right-of-centre vote in the Reform Party.   They ordered CSIS, the spy agency created in the last month of the Trudeau premiership, to create another fake neo-Nazi group, the Heritage Front, which the media again went wild over.   This was in 1989, two years after the Reform Party was formed.   The purpose seems to have been to smear the Reform Party by association, a goal towards which they received assistance from lawyer, activist and Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella in his 1997 book Web of Deceit, which, in my opinion ought to be categorized as fiction, under which genre it might actually deserve an award for its creative plot about the imminent threat of  a neo-Nazism working through the  conservative movement  and  the Reform Party to take over Canada.   Note this is the same Warren Kinsella, who should not be confused with the late novelist W. P. Kinsella (W. P. stood for William Patrick, Warren is, I think, a middle name), but who was, according to a Globe and Mail article conveniently timed to come out just before the last Dominion election, hired by Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives to sling mud of a similar nature against Maxime Bernier, Scheer’s chief rival in the previous Conservative Party leadership race, and his new People’s Party of Canada.

Erin O’Toole has now followed the shameful examples of Mulroney and Scheer.   His motive is obvious enough – only a few weeks ago he was jumped on by Captain Airhead, for giving an interview to Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media.   Captain Airhead, who thinks that only media that he subsidizes and which express views of which he approves, should be allowed to exist, condemned the Rebel as being “Far Right”.   If he had Ludwig von Mises’ concept of “Left” and “Right” as a spectrum moving from total government control on the Left to an absence of government on the Right, he might have had a point, as The Rebel is quite libertarian, but I very much doubt he has read Mises or that he possesses the capacity to do so.   The interview, however, came shortly before the incident on Epiphany when, as Donald the Orange was addressing half a million of his supporters before the Washington Monument, a smaller group entered the Congress building on Capitol Hill, took selfies and, unfortunately in a handful of cases, got into violent skirmishes with the Capitol Hill Police, all of which was blown up by the same media that supported the BLM and Antifa anti-white hate riots that produced far more destruction, violence, and death all across America, into the ludicrous lie of “Trump incites insurrection”.   O’Toole, pissing himself, immediately proceeded to proclaim how much he and the party he leads are against “white supremacists”, by which the media seems to mean anyone who opposes anti-white racism and certainly everyone – all 75 million American voters of them – who supported Trump.   He also took the opportunity to throw his own rival from last year’s leadership race under the bus and out of the party.

Well, perhaps he can instruct his party to stop soliciting me for funds.   I have not received a campaign contribution from Paul Fromm, as I have never stooped so low as to run for office, but I have donated to the Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, the Canadian Association for Free Expression, and the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee, all of which were founded or co-founded by said Paul Fromm, whom I have known for years.  The first mentioned, which is also, I believe, the oldest is “a group of aid reformers who eschew guilt and believe that population control and free enterprise are the key to development”.   I took that definition from the Glossary in my personally inscribed copy of Down the Drain? A Critical Re-examination of Canadian Foreign Aid written by Paul Fromm and James P. Hull and published by Griffin House, Toronto in 1981.  Fromm and Hull’s approach to foreign aid has always made more sense to me than the Liberal policy of taxing poor people in rich countries to subsidize rich people in poor countries, never more evident than under the current Prime Minister.   The Canadian Association for Free Expression was founded shortly prior to when Brian Mulroney became Prime Minister which was also around the time that Canada’s two most publicized trials for crimethink began, those of Ernst Zuendel, the German born graphic artist and publisher who resided in Toronto and James Keegstra, the school teacher and mayor from Eckville , Alberta.   CAFE is committed to the classical liberal view of John Stuart Mill that speech, whether right, wrong, or somewhere in between, ought never to be suppressed.   While there are many who would think that the cases of Zuendel, whose publications included The Hitler We Loved and Did Six Million Really Die?, and Keegstra, who taught his students that the Jews were behind a conspiracy to dominate the world, stretch that principle past its breaking point, these are, in my opinion, wrong.   Cases like this are not the breaking point of freedom of speech, they are its test.   Only those willing to stand up for freedom of speech, when it is opinions that the vast majority find loathsome that the government is trying to suppress, can truly be said to have passed that test – men like Paul Fromm and the late Doug Christie, who was the lawyer in both of these cases.   If the state is allowed to get away with suppressing extremely unpopular opinions, it will move on to suppressing less unpopular opinions.    In Canada we have moved from the government persecuting a man for saying that Hitler’s victims were significantly less than six-million in number all the way to where the government is trying to tell us that we cannot say that someone born with a penis and testicles and who has XY chromosomes is a man if he self-identifies as a woman.   Give the state censors an inch and they will take a mile.   Pastor Martin Niemöller said “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a socialist.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me”.  It astonishes me that there are those familiar with this poem and the story behind who miss the point completely and will get offended at the application I am about to make.  In 1984 – a rather significant date don’t you think – they came for Ernst Zuendel and James Keegstra, and Doug Christie and Paul Fromm spoke out!   Everyone who values the freedom our country was built upon – Richard Cartwright famously expressed the spirit of Confederation by saying that he preferred British freedom over American equality – and for which we have always been told our country went to war against Hitler, would do well to look to that example.

The progressive media, of course, in their lust to help O’Toole crucify Sloan, has been calling Paul Fromm such names as “white supremacist” and “neo-nazi”, as have those members of the neo-conservative press who have defended Sloan on the same grounds on which he defended himself.   Mr. Fromm has never applied such terms to himself, which the media have thrown against him for decades, but has always eschewed and disavowed them (I once witnessed him do so to someone who actually was a self-proclaimed National Socialist).   He has referred to himself as a “white nationalist” but I remember that when he started doing this the term had not developed the connotations it now has and simply meant something along the lines of an advocate for the rights of white people, similar to what groups like the NAACP are for black people in the United States, and I have never gotten the impression that he meant it in any other way.   He should, perhaps, have foreseen the way the term would evolve.   I never liked the term, although I believe that now more than ever, open advocates for the rights and liberties of white people, who are demonized by racist hate groups such as BLM and Antifa with the full support of the media and the politicians and who are officially discriminated against, are needed.   It confuses “race” with “nation” for one thing.   

For another, nationalisms of any sort tend to conflict with my Tory political philosophy.   One’s monarch is the proper object of political allegiance, not a people, race, or nation, and in association with one’s monarch, one’s country, which is a place, one’s home writ large, although not merely in the sense of a location on a map, but a place vested with tradition and history, expressed in its institutions, and including, of course, those who live there.   This is what the old patriotic cry “for King and country” meant.

This brings me back to Diefenbaker.   

Diefenbaker, because he was the last Conservative leader – and the last Canadian Prime Minister – to really embrace “King and country” or “Queen and country” Toryism in a wholehearted way, was the last Conservative leader and Prime Minister capable of taking the strong stand against racism that he did, without replacing it with racism of another sort, as the Liberals who governed after him did.   This is precisely because “Queen and country” is the only object of allegiance which can truly provide civil unity and harmony.   As W. L. Morton put it “Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself.” (The Canadian Identity, University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972)   If that sounds like Pierre Trudeau’s “mosaic” vision of “multiculturalism”, understand that Trudeau’s doctrine is actually a mockery of this.  Instead of uniting diverse people in loyalty to their Royal Sovereign so that they can all participate in the country over which she reigns in a way that makes the history, traditions, and legacy of freedom of that country their own, Trudeau’s doctrine turned diversity itself into an object of cult worship that keeps them divided so that bureaucrats can increasingly manage their lives and rob them of the freedom that is the property by right of all Her Majesty’s subjects.   If Erin O’Toole really believes that “racism is a disease of the soul” then he would do better to lead his party back to what it was when Diefenbaker led it rather than to win Captain Airhead’s approval by repeating his totalitarian rhetoric about “It has no place in our country” and opportunistically ejecting a rival from the party’s caucus, over his unknowingly having received a donation from the man who has for decades been the most courageous opponent of the only racism that is truly a problem in Canada today, the racism that has been enshrined in law since 1977, anti-white racism.

(1)   This also shows how utterly absurd the expression “Red Tory” is.   Originally, Gad Horowitz coined the term to refer to traditional Tories like George Grant who had some positive views of socialism.   Grant, a strong social conservative who warned that in the legalization of abortion the essence of fascism was coming to North American under the guise of liberalism, did not like having this label applied to him.   Dalton Camp, who was a Mulroney Conservative until Mulroney became a free trader – it is to Camp’s credit that he abandoned the Mulroney camp over this – embraced the label.   Grant wrote his Lament over the fall of the Diefenbaker government, Camp was responsible for ousting Diefenbaker from the party leadership.  Any term coined to refer to the one and appropriated by the other cannot possibly express anything meaningful.    Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 2:02 PM Labels:

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Dominion Day Dolour

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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!
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One Victory Against the Encroaching Totalitarianism

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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.

 
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Justin Trudeau is no Friend of Canada

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THRONE, ALTAR, LIBERTY

THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

The Canadian Red Ensign

THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 2018

Justin Trudeau is no Friend of Canada

 
I, as long time readers will be well aware, am a Canadian and a patriot of my country. Many Canadians seem to think that being a patriotic Canadian means being anti-American but I like to quote one of my two favourite Prime Ministers, (1) John G. Diefenbaker, who said “I am not anti-American, I am very pro-Canadian.” Of course, for a Tory like myself, being a Canadian patriot does involve a firm belief in my country’s own institutions and traditions rather than those of the United States. I believe in parliamentary government, reigned over by a king or queen, rather than republican government presided over by an elected president, and have argued this point at length. I have a very low view of sedition, rebellion, and revolution, which history demonstrates almost always produce a worse and more oppressive government, and so cannot share the common American belief, born out of their founding mythos, that these are the well-spring of liberty. I say rather, with the long-neglected Canadian conservative John Farthing, that “freedom wears a crown” and believe the tradition of loyalty upon which our country was founded and which led us to stand by Britain from the beginning of the Second World War to be a virtuous tradition worthy of honour. I trust that you can see the difference between this attitude and the juvenile, left-wing, anti-Americanism that the Liberals, NDP and Greens seem to think is part and parcel of Canadian patriotism.

I see, therefore, no patriotic reason to come the the defence of Her Majesty’s First Minister in Ottawa simply because he has been on the receiving end of a barrage of insults from the American President and members of his administration. Frankly, he deserved them. While I have no problem with a Canadian Prime Minister standing up for our country – it is his job, after all – Justin Trudeau, in his choice of time and place to say that Canada “will not be pushed around” displayed a stupidity far in excess of that for which his reputation is already well-established. When the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Quebec, commenced, a trade war was already impending between our two countries. Somehow, the leaders had managed to come to an agreement of sorts and an official communication of this had been sent out before Donald Trump took off to Singapore to negotiate what will hopefully be the end of hostilities on the Korean peninsula with Kim Jong-un. It was then that Trudeau called a press conference and uttered his now infamous words, which, given at that particular moment, could only be understood as gloating at having won one over on Trump. This earned him, as was undoubtedly his intention, the admiration of anti-American leftists around the world, but, as with so much other of his grandstanding, it is ordinary Canadians who will have to pay the price in the upcoming trade war which our country simply cannot win. Trudeau has shown his contempt for the teachings of the Holy Scriptures on many occasions but it would have served him well to have read over Luke 14:28-32 before he shot his mouth off and applied its literal meaning even if he continued to ignore the intended spiritual application.

Not only was it the wrong time and place for Trudeau to boast about standing up for Canadians, he was the wrong person to do so. He might have thought that he was simply imitating Trump’s Mr. Tough Guy nationalist rhetoric but there is a huge difference. Trump, for as long as he has been in politics has taken his stand on a hard core, America First, Buchananite, populist-nationalist platform. Trudeau, on the other hand, has worked hard to establish the reputation of being the same kind of left-liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist citizen-of-the-world that his father was. The idea that he would ever put the interests of Canadians ahead of whatever inane brain rot is the latest fashion among liberal intellectuals (2) is laughable.

Consider his track record. His biggest concern in picking the Ministers to fill his Cabinet was not their competency but that the levels of estrogen and testosterone be equal. Feminist ideology and the adoration of the multitudes of young people who have been brainwashed by universities into swallowing that mindless tripe, took precedence for him over the interest of ordinary Canadians in the Ministries of Her Majesty’s government being competently administered. One of the very first things he did in office was to take Canadian taxpayers’ dollars, use it to bring large numbers of the economic migrants invading Europe under the pretence of being refugees from the Syrian Civil War over here, and then take more of the Canadian taxpayers’ dollars to bribe Canadian employers into giving the “refugees” jobs instead of Canadians. He then bullied anyone who objected to this by accusing them of racism. (3)

Trudeau’s attitude towards the Canadian energy industry can only be described as one of arrogant hostility and while this might earn him brownie points with the green gang it does not benefit the average Canadian and works against the interests of all the Canadians employed by the energy industry directly but also those who depend upon the jobs available in an economy that itself is heavily dependent upon affordable energy to survive. He has shut down most of the pipeline projects that would have benefited Canadians across the Dominion, constantly sided with anti-pipeline agitators that are funded by foreign energy interests, and, rather than use force to protect the rights of the petroleum company that had jumped through all sorts of ridiculous loops to obtain legal permission to expand an existing pipeline, opted to buy out the pipeline at the taxpayers’ expence. He has imposed a carbon tax upon the country, driving the cost of gas through the roof, for absolutely no good reason, (4) hurting the most those who were already just barely getting by on the wages from jobs that require vehicular transportation to get to. He has imposed massive debt on future generations of Canadian taxpayers with his runaway defecits, which include large amounts of spending on global projects that do not benefit Canadians, and has increased the cost of living, while reducing the ability of most Canadians to pay through tax increases.

If Canadians have only recently begun to feel the impact of Trudeau’s green agenda on their pocketbooks, we have so far been shielded from the full impact of his anti-business agenda on Canadian employment by the relatively free trade that has existed between our country and the United States, thus allowing us to benefit from economic boom the United States has seen since the election of Donald Trump. That will no longer be the case if Trudeau has gotten us into an unwinnable trade war. Note that I say this as an economic patriot not as a doctrinaire free trader. The basic idea of economic patriotism is that of doing what is best for the economic interests of your country. (5) It is not in your country’s best interests to piss off your largest trading partner, especially if that partner has much more economic clout than you do. Neither, however, is it in your country’s economic best interests to sign free trade agreements that make your country that vulnerable in the first place. Trudeau’s foolish words today would not have the potential to harm us today if Brian Mulroney had not betrayed his party’s historical platform (6) thirty years ago and signed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement that later evolved into NAFTA and which plunged us into three decades of addictive dependency on free trade.

What will eventually come out of all of this only time can tell. What we do know is that we have no reason whatsoever to be proud of our lousy Prime Minister who serious needs to learn to keep his hubristic tongue in his mouth.

(1) The other, of course, being Sir John A. MacDonald.

(2) When I use the word “intellectuals” I have in mind the way Paul Johnson uses the word in his book of that title (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) and the following quotation from the late, great, Tom Wolfe: “We must be careful to make a distinction between the intellectual and the person of intellectual achievement. The two are very, very different animals. There are people of intellectual achievement who increase the sum of human knowledge, the powers of human insight, and analysis. And then there are the intellectuals. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others. Starting in the early twentieth century, for the first time an ordinary storyteller, a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, a playwright, in certain cases a composer, an artist, or even an opera singer could achieve a tremendous eminence by becoming morally indignant about some public issue. It required no intellectual effort whatsoever. Suddenly he was elevated to a plane from which he could look down upon ordinary people. Conversely — this fascinates me — conversely, if you are merely a brilliant scholar, merely someone who has added immeasurably to the sum of human knowledge and the powers of human insight, that does not qualify you for the eminence of being an intellectual.”

(3) Berkeley professor and former Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich maintains that blaming economic stress on immigrants is the sign of an ascending tyrant. This is nonsense. A much more reliable observer, Aristotle, noted almost two and a half millennia ago that a tyrant, unlike a true king, prefers and trusts foreigners over his own people. Politika, Book V.

(4) A carbon tax is an idiotic notion dreamed up in hell by the devil himself. A) CO2 is not a pollutant – it is naturally exhaled by all human and animal life and the more of it in the atmosphere, the better for plant life. B) Over 90% of the Greenhouse Effect is produced by water vapour and CO2 is only a fraction of the remainder. C) The Greenhouse Effect is a good thing not a bad thing – without it the earth would be a lifeless ball of ice. D) Climate has been constantly changing throughout all of history and until all of the causes of this are understood and taken into account – and climate science is not even remotely close to starting to have done this – there can be no way of telling how much recent climate change has been caused by human factors. E) The modern warming trend that is blamed on the burning of fossil fuels actually began with the end of the Little Ice Age decades before the industrial boom and included a forty-year period of cooling after World War II which coincided in time with a large rise in CO2 emissions due to accelerating industrialism. F) The “proof” for the theories of climate-change alarmists is not evidence from real world observations but the simulations of computer models. G) The global warming/climate change scare has been a deliberate fraud since day one. The day on which it was presented to a US Senate Subcommittee in 1988 was consciously chosen to be the statistically hottest day in summer, the summaries of the UN’s IPCC’s reports on climate change were written by environmental bureaucrats and released prior to the science reports which were then redacted to fit the summaries. H) “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period” – Michael Crichton. I) Scientists funded by governments and international agencies like the UN are just as likely to provide the results they are paid to provide as scientists funded by petroleum companies.

(5) Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s theories of absolute and comparative advantage ought to be considered, when determining what is best for your country, but they ought not to be treated as outweighing all other considerations.

(6) The Conservative government of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, introduced its “National Policy” to the public in 1876 (they had been discussing it internally since the 1860s), campaigned on it in 1878, and put it in practice in 1879. The policy was similar to that adopted by the new Republican Party in the United States a decade earlier and that which would be adopted by the government of the newly unified Germany – protecting domestic manufacturers with tariffs and the use of government revenue on internal infrastructure improvements, which in Canada’s case meant the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The policy worked quite well in developing the manufacturing base of all three countries, by contrast with the free trade practice introduced in England, the birthplace of industrialism, at the behest of the Manchester manufacturers. While it was agricultural tariffs (the Corn Laws) the latter sought to repeal, their practice of free trade in this same period that America and Germany were practicing economic nationalism led to their falling behind the USA in industrial development. The Canadian Conservative “National Policy” was something of a last-option-available measure initially, but it worked for Canada for almost a century, and it became a fixed plank in the Conservative platform until Mulroney removed it. The old Conservatives believed it to be necessary, not only for the protection of Canada’s own industries and resources, but for her political and cultural protection as well (at least the cultural protection of English Canada, the Victorian-era British culture of which did not have the built-in protection against Americanization of a language barrier like French Canada). The Liberals were the party that wanted free trade and Americanization. Today’s Grits are not likely to admit to being the party of the latter, although they obviously base their policies on what the craziest trend in Hollywood is at any given moment, spewing left-wing anti-Americanism of the sort that Jean-François Revel so ably exposed as irrational in his 2004 monograph of that title. Nevertheless, it was openly admitted by Liberal thinkers of the past such as Goldwyn Smith and John Wesley Dafoe. Their economic arguments and historical interpretations in favour of the Liberal project of undoing Confederation and moving Canada into the American orbit were fully rebutted by Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Eugene Forsey.

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