Tag Archives: Sir John A. Macdonald

Parks Canada Wrecking Crew Trash Sir John A. Macdonald & Canada’s Founders’ Heritage

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Jamie Sarkonak: Parks Canada’s agenda to erode any pride for John A. Macdonald

The agency is increasingly dedicating itself to the airing of unresolvable historic grievances

Author of the article:

Jamie Sarkonak

Published May 21, 2024  •  5 minute read

209 Comments

The Sir John A. MacDonald statue as seen at Queen's Park Circle at the foot of the Ontario Legislature in Toronto, ON on Thursday August 24, 2017.
The Sir John A. MacDonald statue as seen at Queen’s Park Circle at the foot of the Ontario Legislature in Toronto, Ont. on Thursday August 24, 2017. Photo by Laura Pedersen/National Post

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If you happen to be in Kingston, Ont. in the next several months, consider visiting the newly re-opened Bellevue House National Historic Site, John A. Macdonald’s historic home. With careful timing, you might be able to attend the hour-or-so “Unpacking Macdonald” tour about racism, sexism and the first prime minister’s political decisions.

“Bring an open mind and open heart and join the discussion in this safe space,” reads the tour description.

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As diversity initiatives often are, this little tour is just one outcome of Parks Canada’s broader effort to integrate progressive identity politics into its mission. Nearly a decade of Liberal governance has made Canadian heritage a tool to reinforce contemporary multiculturalism, guided by careful demographic tallying augmented by subtle social commentary.

It goes back to at least 2019, when Parks Canada released a new system plan for history and commemoration. The framework set four priorities for the agency to address reconciliation and Canada’s changing demographics, among other things: Indigenous history, environmental history, diversity and “Canada and the world.” These replaced the priorities of the previous plan (Aboriginal history, women’s history and ethnocultural communities’ history) that had been in place since 2000. There is no priority, of course, for just … Canada.

Indeed, the Parks Canada belief seems to be that people are inherently narcissistic, unable to appreciate the past unless every story, every institution, mirrors the identities of today’s Canada.

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By 2020, then-environment minister John Wilkinson launched a series of consultations on how to move Parks Canada onward. The government’s summary of the consultations predictably focused on identity: those who aren’t able-bodied white males “frequently feel excluded from these places” and therefore more change was needed. Suggested solutions included subsidizing transportation to parks for low-income Canadians, valuing all world views equally and ensuring that employees demographically reflect the population.

In 2022, the Liberals moved towards demographically reflective park governance with the tabling of Bill C-23, the historic places of Canada act. The law, which remains in second reading and would replace the current Historic Sites and Monuments Act if passed, would add mandatory Indigenous seats to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. Though, the board is currently diversity-quota-free and has Indigenous members already. The new law would also mandate that “Indigenous knowledge” inform decisions on historical designations — a bizarre affirmation by the government that ethno-epistemology should guide policy.

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These changes to the law were specifically requested by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which, evidently, have been accepted uncritically by the government.

Following the new plans and bills, Parks Canada came out with a new values and ethics code in 2023 that also championed the cause of total diversity. It emphasized the importance of “Indigenous knowledge” once more, as well as the need to tell history in a “socially” responsible way. Unobjectionable on their face — responsible storytelling is always a good thing, and Indigenous input can certainly round out the stories of early Canada — but by invoking ethnicity-based knowledge and the social-justice-adjacent term “social responsibility,” the code takes on a political tone.

Later, on the Parks Canada ethics code outlines the organization’s commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), it regurgitating the familiar list of prioritized groups:

“Being a successful and innovative agency is rooted in our ability to create inclusive spaces…. This also means providing fair and equitable access to opportunities for under-represented people including: Black, Indigenous, people of colour, the Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer+ (2SLGBTQ+) community and people living with disabilities.”

It is a good thing to accurately depict history. But the outsized focus on small subsets of the population and the insistence to tell “socially responsible” stories that jive with today’s obsession with perfect ethnic representation in every institution is unlikely to accurately portray the past, as Canada was not as diverse back then as it is today.

In practice, Parks Canada has set a number of practical goals to achieve total diversity. According to its 2023 departmental plan, an in-the-works DEI strategy would pilot an employee sponsorship program for anyone who is not white, able-bodied and straight.

As far as the telling of history goes, Parks Canada’s transformation is best illustrated by its newest changes. The agency is currently reviewing 210 historical designations for colonial assumptions, problematic terminology, controversial beliefs and behaviours, and the absence of “a significant layer of history.” These sites, which often acknowledge historical figures of note, may have their plaques edited — or removed entirely. While editing might be in order for some, the prospect of removal is chilling.

An update to Parks Canada’s management plan for Anne of Green Gables-related sites on Prince Edward Island now seeks to “share more inclusive histories and seek to advance reconciliation” — even though the Indigenous presence on the island when Lucy Maud Montgomery lived was likely low.

And most recently, the agency animated its strategic priority of “diversity” at last weekend’s opening event for Bellevue House. Reporting from the function, Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington quoted Jarred Picher, a director at Parks Canada, telling the crowd that Macdonald’s “prime ministership has left deep harms that continue to be felt over 150 years later” — an ominous message to inspire shame in the nation’s founding.

Another speaker, Channon Oyeniran, a vice-president of the Ontario Black History Society with a very limited list of publications, told the Bellevue House crowd that Macdonald is remembered for his role in building the nation — but “he is also remembered for his harmful, discriminatory and exclusionary views and policies toward various racialized groups of people, including Indigenous Peoples, Chinese Canadians, Black Canadians and many more.” She claimed that Canada was “steeped in racism, colonialism, white supremacy and other legacies of enslavement.”

Another speaker, Amy Go, president of the Chinese Canadian National Council For Social Justice, claimed that racist occurrences towards Asian Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic “can in many ways be traced back to the time when John A. Macdonald and other politicians of the day” because they had “portrayed Chinese as foreigners.”

Forget Macdonald’s architecting of the Canadian state, his vaccination and famine relief programs, his belief in law and order and the protection of Indigenous subjects from violent Americans to the south.

I haven’t taken the “Unpacking Macdonald” tour at Bellevue House; when I asked Parks Canada for details about its content Friday, a representative offered to simply provide me (or a local Postmedia reporter) the tour. So, being in Alberta and thus unable to capitalize on the invitation, I can’t rule out that Parks Canada includes nuanced and fair social context when recounting Macdonald’s life. However, given the agency’s big-picture plans, and the fact that the site’s opening was clouded by community representatives airing their unresolvable historic grievances, I suspect it’s unlikely.

Parks Canada wants to tell a story that demoralizes the nation by painting its founder as a Hitlerian figure; proper context wouldn’t allow for that.

Making Black History a Mandatory Course in Ontario Schools is A HUGE MISTAKE — DON’T DO IT

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Dear Mr. Lecce,

My ancestors immigrated from England  to Toronto (York as it was then called) in 1829, I am proud of my English colonial heritage.  It is very discouraging to witness the government, of which you are a Minister, go along with the lunatic stated policies at the Toronto District School Board, that instruct teachers that education is a negative “colonial structure that centers whiteness ” and other ridiculous comments such as “white supremacy must be dismantled”.. THIS SORT OF COMMENT IS AN INSULT TO ME. 

For generations, there has always been a lunatic Marxist fringe in political life, however now these people have infected the education system and have taken it over. YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWING THIS.  Schools are being use as media to indoctrinate kids into Marxism.   If they get away with it, THIS WILL BE THE END OF OUR SOCIETY, as they create their dysfunctional “utopia”.

I know white parents who are taking their kids out of public schools, home-schooling them, because they do not want them to be exposed to this garbage.. YET YOU SUPPORT THIS !       In doing so, you are failing the people who are suppose to be the base of your political party.

It was recently announced that Black History would be a required course in a number of grades in school.  This is very disturbing, because these questionable courses will be displacing other subjects.  Young people today learn very, very little about more important subjects like Canadian History, Confederation and who Sir John A Macdonald was. I have yet to meet anyone under the age of 30 who can recite the names of all of the Prime Ministers since Confederation.   Many people have no idea who is on our dollar bills. 

Colonialism is what created our great country. Before white Anglo Saxons and Europeans came here the indigenous tribes were simply stone-age hunter-gathers and they would have remained that way.  

Making Black History courses mandatory will further result in the destruction of our country, which is already well under way.    

A Conservative government like yours is supposed to conserve things, OR DID YOU FORGET THAT?

An Old Stock Canadian, Toronto

A Good Supporter’s Letter to Premier Ford About Preserving Our Monuments — A Model Letter You Might Use

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Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario

Legislative Building
Queen’s Park
Toronto ON M7A 1A1

Dear Mr. Ford

RE:  SAVE THE JOHN A. MACDONALD STATUE AT THE FOOT OF QUEEN’S PARK

I am writing to you because I am a patriotic Canadian with a family history in the Toronto area going back six generations. I am concerned about the wanton destruction of our proud history by the political left.  I am even more concerned by the apparent compliance of the Progressive Conservative government of Ontario, giving into violent Marxist vandals every time they raise a fuss.

My immigrant ancestor, William Lawson, was a Methodist preacher who came to Toronto in 1829, from Cumberland County, England. He almost certainly would have known Egerton Ryerson personally.     In my opinion, Ryerson has been treated in a biased and unfair way by historical revisionists, who are determined to portray him in a negative manner.  Following the implementation of Responsible Government in 1848, Ryerson helped to design the education curriculum and his progressive policies were intended to assist the indigenous people, not harm them.

In June of 2021, a group of leftist vandals, including Peruvian national, Miguel Avila Valerde and others, toppled and destroyed the statue of Egerton Ryerson, on Gould Street, at the Ryerson University Campus.  The incident occurred after a demonstration to support the alleged 215 indigenous children whose bodies were allegedly found buried in an apple orchard at the site of the former Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

In the June 2021 Ryerson campus incident, the police were apparently on site, but they left the site and did NOTHING to stop the statue’s destruction.  I subsequently spoke to a number of police from the relevant Division and the response they allude to is that they did not prevent the destruction because they did not have the support of Toronto City Council and other levels of Government and none of the police wanted to be featured apprehending a vandal, on a cell phone video, mounted on YOU TUBE, which might end their careers.       

                                                                                                                                                …/ 2

– 2 –

Miguel Velarde is from Peru. What do you suppose would happen if I went to Peru and proceeded to attack a statue of Simon Bolivar, the founder and liberator of a number of Latin American countries from Spanish colonial rule ?   I expect I might be jailed and deported, however an Ecuadorian acquaintance of mine has advised that I would probably be killed by the local people, as they love their country and cherish its founder.  This is in contrast to us here in Canada, where children have been brainwashed in schools to hate their country and to despise its founding fathers.. WHY ?   

We are witnessing the increased influence of cultural Marxists, who follow a textbook method in the playbook of communist propaganda, which involves always having a narrative of victimization they can promote.  They have to have a victim and a villain. If they do not have a convenient villain available, then they will manufacture one by twisting the truth and telling lies.  In recent years they have vilified the founder of Halifax, Edward Cornwallis and had his statue taken down, using a stacked committee, set up by Halifax City council.   The Marxist  historical revisionists then  moved on to Egerton Ryerson and then to John A. Macdonald. After they are finished with these two important figures, they will next attack Wilfred Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King.  The ultimate goal is the erasure of any important white Anglo-Saxon people from our history books, in order to pave the way for implementation of Globalist-Marxist “utopian” society.   This is not the sort of world I want to live in.

People like me will vote for a Conservative government because we want the government to CONSERVE things, to maintain status quo.  Increasingly, so called conservative governments in this country very quickly bend to the left, as soon as they get into office, betraying their traditional base in the process.   Erin O’Toole is a good example of this.

In a news broadcast, you referred to the “human remains” that were allegedly discovered at the site of the Kamloops Indian residential school.  In researching this topic, I have spent many hours reviewing various news reports and so called “expert” opinions. My view is also informed by fact that I have a degree in geology, I studied geophysical exploration and I worked in the exploration geophysics department at a large oil company in Calgary.  In contrast, Sarah Beaulieu, the woman who conducted the ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey upon which the inflammatory claims of 215 burials are based, is not a trained scientist, nor a professional, rather she is an anthropologist. She also has a conflict of interest, in view of her indigenous background.   People with a proper technical background will understand the limitations of the GPR : all it will tell you is where there is a contrast in the soil density, that’s all. In order to conclude that a human burial had taken place, you have to perform a dig.  To date NO EXCAVASIONS HAVE TAKEN PLACE AT KAMLOOPS AND THERE IS NO REAL EVIDENCE OF ANY BURIALS.  These facts points to the mostly likely reason why :  the entire narrative is a rather poorly concocted fraud. THERE NEVER WERE ANY BURIALS  in  the orchard at Kamloops.  The CBC Fifth Estate documentary on this site contains nothing but hearsay, myths and indirect allegations.  I spent hours going over that program, which was re-broadcast.    The conspirators in this drama know they have a problem, because as soon as the original allegations were questioned, the claims of 215 burials were quickly reduced to “200 potential burials”.     

                                                                                                                                                .. / 3 

– 3 –

Federal Minster David Lametti recently has appointed an “interlocutor” (an indigenous women) and provided her with $10 million and two years to produce a report on native grievances and burial sites. She does not have authority to investigate crime. Her job will be to prevent a proper investigation. If the Kamloops orchard had been a real crime scene, the appropriate procedure would be for the RCMP to secure the area and then initiate a forensic examination and organize a dig, in junction with the local coroner’s office (as was the case with the Willie Pickton site, in lower mainland  B.C.).   The fact that this has not been done speaks volumes.   Reports also indicate that the RCMP is reluctant to get involved because it has been politicized.   The cops do not want to lose their jobs.                   

In connection with the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy in Ottawa in February 2022, you decried what you described as “desecration” of Ottawa monuments and statues, such as the War Memorial and the Terry Fox statue.  No defacing or lasting damage was done to either of these monuments.  Contrast your comments about these Ottawa monuments to the fate suffered by important statues here in Toronto, such as King Edward VII statue (by Brock) in Queen’s Park, the John A. Macdonald statue (by McCarthy)  in Queen’s Park South, which is now behind plywood, the Ryerson statue (by McCarthy), which has been destroyed and more recently the Robert Burns statue in Allen Gardens, which has been defaced and is at the center of an illegal native encampment, which the City of Toronto refuses to remove.  Why are you not equally outspoken about the latter monuments?  

It is unfortunate that the matter of the John A MacDonald statue was not dealt with in a more direct manner and instead it was given to Speaker, Ted Arnott, to deal with.  The obsequious words posted on plastic sign on the plywood box are nauseating to read.  Caving in to the political left only provides them with more incentive

Just last week, in an apparent repetition of the plywood boarding procedure, the monument to the 1885 North West Rebellion, by Walter Allward, was placed behind a plywood barrier.   Putting down the North West Rebellion was a unfortunate incident in Canadian history, however it had to be done.  Concern is that this statue will now suffer a fate similar to the one suffered by the statue of Edward Cornwallis, as Liberal stacked committees generally consign such important monuments to the dustbin of history.  This is because such monuments get in the way of Marxist propaganda. The Marxists want Ontario children to have little sense of their country’s proud history. In that manner they can more easily be corrupted into Globalist communism. Is that what you want?

PLEASE DO THE RIGHT THING, UNVEIL THE JOHN A. MACDONALD AND OTHER IMPORTANT STATUES AT QUEEN’S PARK ONCE AGAIN.  PLACE A GUARD ON DUTY TO PROTECT THEM AND TO DETER FURTHER VANDALISM.

A RESPONSE TO THIS LETTER WILL BE APPRECIATED. THANK YOU.

Yours truly,

The Trashing of Canadian History to Help Usher in Our Replacement

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The Trashing of Canadian History to Help Usher in Our Replacement

The removal or desecration of statues on Canadian historical heroes is part of a psychological attack on the European founding/settler people of this country. The authorities have done little to the wrecking crew. Some cowardly self-haters like the City of Victoria have given in to the wrecking crew and removed the statue of the founder of our country Sir John A. Macdonald. Some will fault find and critique these heroes of the past. Sir John A. was hostile to Chinese immigration. So, too, were most Canadians at the time. Applying today’s politically correct sentiments misses the point. These men and women are being honoured for what they contributed or accomplished, not because they were saints.

Justin Trudeau’s habit of issuing fulsome apologies and buckets of cash to alleged victims of Canada’s past — the Komagata Maru, turning away the Jews on the St. Louis in 1939, etc. — leaves the impression that Old Stock Canada was a morally bereft country AND not worth preserving. If our history was rotten and our heroes all rotters, why should we seek to preserve ourselves and resist being replacement in the carefully organized Great Replacement of Canada’s European founding/settler people through mass Third World immigration

Attached are some random photos I found on  the Internet.. Included with them are photos of PERUVIAN NATIONAL,  MIGUEL AVILA VELARDE pictured with his local native militant friend, SKYLER WILLIAMS , in which the are gloating after the destruction of the  EGERTON RYERSON statue .  They destroyed it, with hammers, crowbars and a grinder….  WHY WERE THESE TWO NOT SENT TO JAIL???    THE EVIDENCE IS RIGHT THERE.


VELARDE was later involved in pulling down  and damaging the JOHN A MACDONALD STATUE , by WADE,. in HAMILTON…… IF HE HAS BEEN IN JAIL, WHERE HE BELONGS, HE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DO THIS.   NEXT,  VELARDE JUST RAN FOR CITY COUNCIL IN WARD 13 !     This is so strange you could not dream it up ! Why was he not charged? Why is he not forcefully confronted and told, “if you think the country YOU chose to immigrate to is so racist, why did you not stay in Peru?

Doug Ford complained of the “desecration”  of the Terry Fox statue  in OTTAWA (someone draped a Canadian flag over it during the Freedom Convoy protests). Has he denounced the desecration of other statues or taken steps to protect and re-exhibit the Macdonald statue in Queen’s Park in 2020?It has been encased in plywood. It should be reopened and a permanent guard stationed there.


(The lettering on Mackenzie King is added and based on his quoted statements)….

The statue of the great educator Egerton Ryerson toppled. The foreigner who heads Ryerson University will not restore the statue and has changed the institution’s name to Metropolitan U.
MIGUEL AVILA VELARDE with head of demolished statue of Egerton Ryerson

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

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                                                  Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, July 1, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!

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

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

The Wrecking Crew At Work: TheBank of Canada is Complicit in Erasing Canadian History WE NEED TO STOP THIS

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The Wrecking Crew At Work: The Bank of Canada is Complicit in Erasing Canadian History

WE NEED TO STOP THIS

Beginning in the year 2018, there were two concurrent versions of the C$ 10 produced, one version of the note hosts an image of Canadian civil rights activist, Voila Desmond, while another version of the note has a revised image of John A. Macdonald, looking rather old, tired and ugly. Around the same time, the version of Wilfred Laurier on the $5 bill was replaced with an image of him looking old and clapped out. It rather appears that there was a plan in place to remove Macdonald and Laurier from the $10 and $5 bills permanently. Perhaps the plotters had the idea that the generaltHE public would be more accepting of their removal if they were both made to look as ugly as possible first.

The current plan of the Bank of Canada is to remove Macdonald and Laurier, from the $10 and the $5 and to put them on $50 and $100 notes, while removing Robert Borden and William Lyon Mackenzie King off of these higher value notes for good.  This has the effect of erasing Canadian history.

A contest is currently underway to replace Laurier on the $5 bill, with a winner to be announced.

Canadian ten dollar bill traditional.jpg
Canadian_$10_note_2018_viola.jpg


Perhaps individuals such as Viola Desmond are worthy of recognition, however she is simply nowhere near Macdonald or Laurier in her importance of her contribution to Canadian history. For that reason, it is important that these two Canadian Prime Ministers retain their positions on the high circulation $10 and $5 bills.

In addition, Robert Borden and William Lyon Mackenzie King should not be tampered with either.

Robert Borden was Prime Minister during the First World War.  His government passed the War Measures Act, created the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and eventually introduced compulsory military service, which sparked the 1917 conscription crisis. The Borden government dealt with the consequences of the Halifax Explosion, introduced women’s suffrage for federal elections, and used the North-West Mounted Police to break up the 1919 Winnipeg general strike.


MacKenzie King was the dominant Canadian political leader from the 1920s through the 1940s. He served as the tenth prime minister of Canada in 1921–1926, 1926–1930 and 1935–1948. He is best known for his leadership of Canada throughout the Second World War (1939–1945) when he mobilized Canadian money, supplies and volunteers to support Britain while boosting the economy and maintaining morale on the home front. He was the longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history. A survey of scholars in 1997 ranked MacKenzie King as the first in importance among all Canada’s prime ministers, ahead of Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

Patriots should voice their displeasure to the Bank Of Canada, by calling 1-800-303-1282

REFUSE TO ACCEPT VIOLA DESMOND $10 NOTES. DEMAND A TRADITIONAL $5 or $10 NOTE WITH THE IMAGE OF A BONA-FIDE CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER ON IT.

ALSO, PLEASE WRITE A LETTER TO THE NEWLY APPOINTED GOVERNOR OF THE BANK OF CANADA, EXPRESSING YOUR DISPLEASURE, AT THE ADDRESS BELOW
:


Tiff Macklem, Governor
Bank of Canada,
234 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ONTARIO
K1A 0G9

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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Manufacturing Heroes: The Beatification of Viola Desmond

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Manufacturing Heroes: The Beatification of Viola Desmond

“When a man starts to hate himself the path to destruction is already open, the same is true of a nation.”
Vivekananda

 

So Viola Desmond’s face finally made it on Canada’s new ten dollar bill. Not a moment too soon though, because the suspense has been killing me.  Ever since the media announced two years ago that Desmond was the winner of contest to see which Canadian heroine would displace John A. MacDonald.

 

I recall that moment with clarity.   Global TV News had just finished talking about the achievements of the late John Glenn, when Viola’s fan club came up to the plate. The newscaster described Desmond’s refusal to move from the “whites only” area of the Roseland movie theatre as a “brave and defiant act” and a “transformative protest”. To bolster the point, interviewee Dr. Annette Henry noted that since she did it 9 years before Rosa Park, Rosa Park was the American Viola Desmond, rather than the reverse. Makes you proud to be a Canadian, doesn’t it?

 

Two things quickly occurred to me. Neither Global National or BC Global News used the word “brave” to describe John Glenn’s first voyage in space. In other words, it apparently took more courage to defy the seating arrangement rules of a movie theatre in Nova Scotia than it did to sit at the top end of a rocket, be propelled into space, revolve twice around the planet in a tiny capsule, re-enter the atmosphere and land in the ocean intact.

 

Keep in mind that as humiliating as it was for a black woman  in Nova Scotia to be denied entry to a portion of a movie theatre because of her race, there wasn’t a lynch party of Klansmen waiting outside for her when she left. Her refusal to leave her seat prompted the theatre manager and a police officer to drag her off, and in the ensuing scuffle, her hip was injured.  But still, suffering an injury of that nature, and being jailed and fined didn’t carry the risk that Glenn incurred. The repercussions that Desmond suffered were less than life-threatening. Glenn’s life in space was on the line for 5 hours. Courage? Bravery? Game-changing? My vote would go the astronaut.

The other salient fact that emerged from Desmond’s beatification is that—to use the words of the Global News reporter—“in 2018 John A. MacDonald will be bumped off the $10 bill” to make way for Desmond. That, to me, offers the most significant clue as to what this is all about. It is about an Anglo-Celtic Canadian, a member of one of two founding nations, a nation-builder, being replaced by what a social justice warrior’s idea of what a real hero looks like. . It is a statement that one symbolic blow against social injustice in a movie theatre is of greater importance than the building of the railway that actually created a nation from sea to sea. I mean, what did John A. MacDonald do—-except be instrumental in the movement to build a national railway and complete a nation?  Had there been no MacDonald, there would have no Canadian currency to exhibit Viola Desmond’s likeness. No Orders of Canada or awards to celebrate Canadian heroes because there would be no Canadians to celebrate.  (Then again, there wouldn’t have been a CBC either, so maybe it would have better if John A. had never been born.)

 

Ah, but you see, MacDonald the nation-builder was a racist who did much harm to native people, and racists don’t deserve to be on our currency or standing in front of Victoria City Hall for that matter. Or so goes the vindictive anti-white narrative of the social justice coalition. But the truth is, as Richard Gwynne pointed out, MacDonald was unusually liberal-minded for his time.

 

VIOLA DESMOND

 “Among his lifelong friends were Indians and Métis. He wasn’t in the least afraid to tell the truth about relations between native people and whites, as in: ‘We must remember they are the original owners of the soil of which they have been dispossessed by the covetousness or ambition of our ancestors’. Most remarkably, he got MPs to agree to the most imaginative reform of his time: any Indian could gain the vote while retaining all his privileges, such as freedom from taxes. Unhappily, Laurier cancelled this reform, with the measure not restored until John Diefenbaker did so in 1960, which was far too late to make any difference.”

 

Gwynne continued,

“His actual policy for getting food to the Indians — one his critics always avoid citing — was: ‘We cannot as Christians, and as men with hearts in our bosoms, allow the vagabond Indian to die before us . . . We must prevent them from starving, in consequence of the extinction of the buffalo and their not yet (having) betaken themselves to raising crops’ “.https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2015/01/09/sir_john_a_macdonald_the_greatest_pm_of_all.html

The man was obviously not a saint, but then who was? Certainly not his aboriginal counterparts. Certainly not Chief McQuinna of the Nootka who had a Vancouver school named after him. MacDonald had many faults but cannibalism wasn’t one of them.  He drank whiskey, but never blood.  And the”genocide” which he was falsely accused of was not an uncommon practice of native tribes and tribal leaders in countless tribal wars across the land for millennia. European settlers did not invent ethnic cleansing.

Viola Desmond’s champions tell us that it is important for Canadians to know their history, especially young Canadians. Retired Manitoba Judge Brian Giesbrecht would concur. He wrote that it is both “proper and necessary” for children to be taught the history of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) because “… a caring and compassionate society should know its history, warts and all.”  Then Giesbrecht added a crucial qualification. “But the history that is being taught needs to be accurate. And the IRS story entering classrooms is not accurate at all.” https://fcpp.org/2017/11/02/teaching-the-residential-school-story

As an example, Giesbrecht cited the well-known Chanie (Charlie) Wenjack story.

”He was the unhappy Indigenous boy who supposedly ran away from the Residential School he was attending after suffering physical and sexual abuse from Roman Catholic priests and nuns. This version of the Chanie story is the subject of a popular song, and appears as well in several books, CBC videos, and numerous articles. His story is very moving, and increasingly our nation’s children accept it as fact. Except that it isn’t fact. It comes nowhere close to being the truth.

The fact is that Chanie Wenjack did not attend a Residential School…(And) there is absolutely no evidence that Roman Catholic priests or nuns abused Chanie as implied in the song, books, and in the video about his life. There is no evidence that he had any contact at all with priests and nuns, much less abusive contact.

Chanie’s story is indeed a very sad one, but the fact that so many people have played fast and loose with its truth should greatly trouble Canadians.

What has been done with Chanie’s story typifies the types of distortion –– half truths, exaggerations, and misleading information –– that characterize so much of the Residential School story many Canadians now believe to be fact.”

Space does not allow for the full reproduction of Giesbrecht’s damning revelations here, but you get the gist. Most of what Canadians have been told about IRS by the social justice industry and its CBC mouthpiece is a goddamn lie.  Fake history customized to serve the far left agenda of the day.  Today it is the plight of aboriginal children or the systemic racism against blacks. Tomorrow it may be about the bullying of transgender people, or alleged wage income gap between men and women. But in every case, viewers are left to ask, “Is that the truth—or did you hear it on the CBC?”

The Viola Desmond story has now joined a pantheon of dubious narratives that form the catechism of exposes, indictments and accusations that social justice warriors ritually trot out against white settlers and their descendents, against Canada’s two founding  peoples and all Canadians of European ancestry. It sounds like a broken record.  The Chinese Head Tax. The Oriental Exclusion Act. The Komagata Maru incident. The St. Louis. Japanese Internment. The Indian Residential Schools. And from now to eternity, the Viola Desmond Story. Lest we forget, more and more days and more and more months are being dedicated to designated victim groups, to the memory of white-inflicted injuries and the celebration of their heroic and resilient victims. Repeated lies become facts. And sins become indelible.

True to form, what we have heard and seen concerning the Viola Desmond story is often contradictory.  After ploughing through the 44 minute documentary “Long Journey to Justice”, the one minute video of  the Roseland theatre incidence, plus numerous articles and interviews, one can be forgiven for feeling confused.  For example, in her song “Viola Desmond” singer Faith Nolan tells us that Desmond “sat down under a sign that said ‘no blacks allowed’, but according to Wikipedia there was no sign that informed patrons about seat segregation. Another article stated that Desmond was sold a ticket to the cheaper balcony seats without being aware of black-white seating policy. However, in the one minute video, when the Desmond character asked for “one ticket down’ she was promptly told that those seats were not available to “you people”.

Another version had Desmond walking toward the downstairs section after purchasing a ticket and being called back because she didn’t have a ticket for that section. Her ‘place’ was in the balcony with ‘her kind’.  Her heroism consisted in the spontaneous decision to turn around and find a seat there anyway. In that case her resistance did not begin until after she sat down in the forbidden seat, and at that point, she could not have been unaware of the segregation policy. All accounts agree that when the usher brought the manager over to order Desmond to leave, she was eventually dragged out by “two burly men”, arrested, sent to jail with an injured hip, and without being informed of her “right” to counsel. The trouble is, there was no “right to call a lawyer” in 1946.  Even Americans did not have Miranda rights until 1966, while Canadians had to wait for the 1962 Bill of Rights and Section 10 of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms to win a partial semblance of Miranda.

Of course, against the backdrop of racial discrimination in Nova Scotia, and Canada at large, critics would dismiss these challenges as mere nitpicking  Maybe, but they serve to illustrate that Leftist narratives must not be swallowed without a least one grain of salt. Court cases and narratives can turn on a neglected or incorrect detail.  And given their track record of misinterpreting seminal events like the Vancouver riot of 1907 and the aforementioned “pantheon” of shameful white misdeeds, one be excused for treating Leftist historiography with deep scepticism.

The ‘big picture’, as I  see  it, is not the reality of the patchy and inconsistent color bar that existed  in post war Nova Scotia, but the attempt by black activists and their allies to paint anti-black racism in Canada in the same bold and harsh terms as prevailed in the Deep South. Unbelievably, when Canadian activists are made aware of how much rougher life was for blacks in America, they say what was said in the documentary.  “At least down South, blacks knew what the rules were, but here the rules varied from place to place day to day.”  Which leads one to ask, if white Canadians were so horribly racist, why wasn’t there an underground railway in the other direction?

The point here is that our enemies are manufacturing history and manufacturing heroes, while  discrediting ours. Media outlets like the CBC are not giving us the full goods. As a consequence, a whole generation is being brought up to believe in a world that never was. Yet they accuse “the Right” of nostalgia for a past that never happened. A classic case of projection.

CBC journalists, history teachers and academics all work for the Ministry of Truth. Like Orwell’s  Winston Smith in 1984, their work consists of revising “back issues” to conform to the present narrative, in service of a globalist agenda. They have made Viola Desmond a courageous, trailblazing hero, of the same stature as a Canadian soldier dodging German bullets as he stormed their bunkers at Juno Beach.  Give us a break.

 

It has been often said that “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” In Canada it would be more appropriate to say that “Those nations the gods wish to destroy they first murder their past”.  The CBC is on a tear to revise our history.  One by one they trot out victims of white racism who overcame discrimination to achieve great things, one identity group at a time.  In one week we got Viola Desmond, Willie O’Ree and “The Grant Fuhr Story”.  I  brace myself for what is to come next month.

 

The CBC has also dedicated hours of programming to tell our children that their great grandparents were racists who excluded Chinese, Indians, and Jews out of pure bigotry.  As previously stated, a closer examination of the facts would indicate that much of this ‘racism’ consisted in attempt to stem the influx of cheap imported labour which was driving down the living standards of Canadian workers.  But this side of the story never gets a hearing.

The end game is to deprive old stock Canadians and their descendants of the moral authority to restrict immigration, resist quota hiring, or reverse the blatant discrimination against white male students and job applicants. Thanks to classroom indoctrination students believe that white settlers stole the land, oppressed racial minorities, and contributed nothing to their well being. So it is not “OK to be white.”

The jury has handed down its verdict. White people, the Canadians of European origin, are a blight. So why  shouldn’t they expiate their original sins by joining the mob to tear down more of their statues—and celebrate the alleged courage of manufactured heroes and the disgrace and demise of their own?

Oh, one more question.  Since we replaced John A. MacDonald with Viola Desmond on our ten dollar bill, do you think Americans would replace George Washington with Rosa Parks on their one dollar bill? Not in your life.

 

Tim Murray

November 29, 2018

— “There’s nothing more dangerous than a shallow-thinking compassionate person.” Garrett Hardin