The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The Circus is Over


The circus that was the Canadian federal election of 2015 is finally over. My response, upon hearing the results, first posted at Free Dominion at 10:24 CST last night was to say:

The projected results of this election, as they stand right now, just go to prove what I, ala Evelyn Waugh, have been saying for some time now - the Queen needs a better method of selecting her ministers than popular election. If we absolutely must have elected officials, then we need a more limited franchise. At least 75% of the current electorate don't deserve the vote and shouldn't have it. The real percentage is probably closer to 95%.

At a future date, we may explore the idea of limiting the franchise at greater length. Now back to the election.

The Liberal Party, headed by Justin Trudeau, has won a majority of 184 seats. The Conservatives, who won a majority in 2011, have been reduced to 99 seats, making them Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The NDP, who were the official opposition during the last government, have been reduced to 44 seats, the Bloc Quebecois are at 10 seats, and the Green Party has a single seat which I assume to be that of its leader Elizabeth May.

The outcome is a mix of the good and the bad. We will briefly consider the good, before looking at what is bad in all of this.

That the far-left NDP, which at one time looked like it might win the election, has been reduced to 44 seats from 103 can only be regarded as a good thing. The NDP was dedicated to the destruction of Canada’s traditional, mixed, constitution. It had vowed to eliminate the Senate, and in response to the Monarchist League of Canada’s question, sent out to all parties earlier this year of whether they and their leader “support the continuance of the constitutional monarchy as Canada's form of governance?” were the only party to give an evasive answer, the three others stating their support for the continuance of the monarchy. The leader of the NDP, Thomas Mulcair, is a man who, displaying an astonishing lack of perspective, simultaneously demanded that Omar Khadr be brought back into Canada and that Conrad Black be kept out. He has also declared that nobody who opposes abortion will ever be allowed to run for the NDP and that the issue should not be open for debate and that evangelical Christians are “un-Canadian”. That he will not be Prime Minister or even leader of the opposition is a blessing. That Pat Martin, the obnoxious jerk who served as NDP incumbent in my constituency of Winnipeg Centre, has finally been ousted, is icing on that cake.

It must also be counted as for the good that Stephen Harper has resigned the leadership of the Conservative Party following his defeat. The party had been in need of a new leader for some time now. Without denying the good that has been accomplished on his watch, such as the abolition of the long-gun registry and the restoration of the “Royal” designation of our Navy and Air Force, the greatest achievement of the Conservative government, the scrapping of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, was brought about by a private member’s bill without Harper’s support and overall he has been a disappointment as a Conservative leader. His courting of the votes of social conservatives while refusing to do anything to halt or reverse the social and moral decay of the country is one example, his Yankee style neoconservative approach to foreign policy coupled with his ludicrous inversion of Teddy Roosevelt’s proverb “speak softly and carry a big stick”, is another. His government’s countless attempts to police Canadians thoughts and words on the internet, culminating in this year’s Bill C-51 was the last straw for me as far as ever voting for the party again while it remained under his leadership was concerned.

Worst of all, however, was his cuckservatism. If you are not familiar with that expression, is has recently become popular in altright, neoreactionary, and other right-wing movements outside of established mainstream conservatism to refer to the tendency, within the latter, to embrace multiculturalism, Third World immigration, political correctness, feminism, and basically the left-wing “rainbow strategy” of appealing to the interests of everyone except whites, Christians, heterosexuals, males and especially all of these combined. Stephen Harper was and is the quintessential Canadian cuckservative, despite the ridiculous efforts of the left-wing parties and media to portray him as a rabid, xenophobic, racist, bigot. Unfortunately, the man who many believe to be the likely next leader of the party, indeed the first name mentioned by Steven Chase in his look at the question of who will succeed Harper for the Globe and Mail, Jason Kenney, is just as much a cuckservative as he is. As Immigration Minister and Minister for Multiculturalism, the only people he seemed to be interested in banning from the country were controversial speakers, whether of the left, like British Labour MP George Galloway, or the right, like Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles Magazine. Worse, he was determined to suppress dissent on the part of Canadians to multiculturalism and mass immigration. As Kevin Michael Grace put it in a 2010 article that demonstrates just how much of a cuckservative Kenney is:

Kenney remains ever vigilant in his search for (secular) heresies.So anyone who criticizes his and Harper`s bemusing obsession with Israel is an "anti-Semite",while anyone who criticizes immigration is a "racist."

Harper’s resignation as Conservative leader, then, must be chalked up on the side of the good that has come out of this election, with the qualification that his successor as leader may end up being as bad as or worse than he is.

The bad side of the outcome of this election is, of course, that Justin Trudeau will now be Prime Minister of Canada with a larger majority behind him than Stephen Harper had for the last four years. If I had my druthers the entire Trudeau family would be permanently banned from ever holding any position of influence in Canada. Justin’s father was the detestable Pierre Elliott Trudeau. An admirer of Red Chinese tyrant Mao Tse-Tung and virtually every tin-pot dictator the Third World ever produced, Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada in 1968. With the exception of a half-year span in which Joe Clark had a minority Conservative government, he was Prime Minister until mid-way through 1984. During that time he completed the “revolution within the form” that Lester Pearson had begun with the changing of Canada’s flag in 1965. In 1969 he legalized homosexuality and in certain circumstances abortion, and began relocating the visa offices to which prospective immigrants then had to go to apply to immigrate to Canada to Third World countries, with the deliberate intention of altering the ethnic makeup of the country. In 1970, he began the war on freedom of thought in Canada by adding the hate propaganda provisions to the Criminal Code and in 1971 declared Canada to be officially multicultural, which meant that from then on Canada would adapt to immigrants rather than expect them to adapt to Canada. In 1977 he introduced the Canadian Human Rights Act, which attacked and undermined Canadians’ traditional freedoms of speech and association, and in 1982, when the Constitution was repatriated to Canada, the culmination of his revolution was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Ever since 1982 the Liberal Party has arrogantly taken credit for giving Canadians the rights and freedoms listed in that foul document, but the only things in the Charter that are worth more than the ink they are written in, the fundamental freedoms listed in section two, and the basic legal rights listed in sections seven through fourteen, Canadians already possessed as their heritage under Common Law as free subjects of Her Majesty. Indeed, Canadians were much freer before the Charter than after, because before 1982 we were brought up to think of ourselves as free to do whatever was not specifically prohibited by law. Since 1982 we have been told to think of our freedoms as those which are specifically defined as such in the Charter. Furthermore, the Charter makes these freedoms and rights less secure than they were before, because section thirty three of the Charter gives the federal and provincial governments the right to pass legislation that violates these rights and freedoms provided it is only temporary. No such exception is made for the sections of the Charter that enshrine multiculturalism, feminism, and bilingualism into our Constitution.

The consequences of the Charter’s making multiculturalism, feminism, and bilingualism inviable, while allowing the government to trample all over the freedoms and rights that are our birthright as free subjects of the Crown, soon became apparent. It turned the Supreme Court of Canada into the instrument of cultural revolution that the American Supreme Court had already been for decades. The ruling in the Singh decision of 1985, which made it next to impossible to deport anyone who claimed refugee status, no matter how obviously bogus the claim, and the ruling in R. v. Morganthaler in 1988 that struck down all existing laws against abortion, are among the examples of Charter based Supreme Court decisions that have radically transformed the country.

All of this is what Justin Trudeau and his supporters proudly look to as their legacy. This is to say nothing of the way Pierre Trudeau courted the good opinion of every Third World shithole while alienating other Western countries, ran Canada heavily into debt, jacked up our taxes, drove inflation through the roof while ruining the economy with heavy-handed statist mismanagement, and turned regional dissatisfaction in both Quebec and the Western provinces into separatist movements that continued to threaten to tear the country apart long after he stepped down from power.

Justin Trudeau gives every indication of being cut from the same cloth as his father. His father was an admirer of Mao, and he expressed admiration for Red China’s dictatorship at a ladies’ fundraiser in Toronto in 2013. His father made abortion legal in cases where three doctors agreed that the mother’s life was in danger, he made the pro-choice position the Liberal party line and told his MPs that they were expected to vote pro-choice on all relevant bills. His father began the browning of Canada by moving our visa officers to our Third World embassies and by allowing the family class of sponsored immigrants to bypass the points system. Justin has promised to eliminate visa requirements for Mexican citizens coming to Canada and to “expand Canada’s intake of refugees from Syria by 25,000 through immediate government sponsorship”, to help private sponsors bring even more in, and to spend $250 million extorted from the Canadian taxpayer to do so. He has promised to continue the moral and intellectual degradation of this country by legalizing marijuana.

Justin Trudeau has accused the previous government of practising “the politics of fear” in its response to Islamic terrorism, but he himself supported the worst of Harper’s anti-terrorism bills, Bill C-51. In fact, the practice of overreacting to terrorism in a way that infringes on the rights and freedoms of ordinary Canadians, goes back to the premiership of his father who invoked the War Measures Act to deal with the FLQ in 1970. In 2001 the Liberal government of Jean Chretien passed anti-terrorist legislation of which the only significant difference with Bill C-51 was that it was set to expire in five years in accordance with the provisions of the notwithstanding clause. As far as the "politics of fear" goes, how else could one describe the way the Trudeau Liberals exploited a completely unrealistic fear of a Canadian revival of Hitlerism and encouraged Canadians to suspect their neighbours and countrymen of harbouring neo-nazi sentiments, in order to discourage dissent from their dogma of egalitarian multiculturalism, thus creating the "political correctness" that has chilled the atmosphere of public debate for the last three decades or so?

Like his father before him, Justin Trudeau has been swept into office by the machinery of the organized media that has endowed him with celebrity status and duped a gullible public into accepting glitter as gold. Let us hope that the second Trudeaumania does not last as long as the first.

11 comments:

  1. Interesting and thought-provoking comments Gerry. I sympathize with much of it. I am a bit concerned that your opening suggestions about people not being fit to vote may well limit the reception of some good ideas. (I guess I'm not a very good Monarchist!)

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    1. Thank you. While I can give an articulate defence of the idea of limiting the franchise, that was not the point of the initial comment so much as to express disgust at the outcome of the election in terms befitting my reactionary royalism. If you look at what I said about the NDP and Harper you will realize that there was no possible outcome to this election that I would not have regarded with similar disgust.

      The idea of a universal, one person, one vote, franchise, is one of the indefensible concepts plaguing the diseased mind of modern man. The ancients knew that votes must be weighed, not just counted. The way voting developed in our system, which began in Britain, of course, was that initially the voters for the constituency representative were themselves a small minority of those who lived in the riding and gradually the vote was extended to all adult males in the riding, then given to women as well. There was a degree of sense to this as long as people thought of the election in terms of choosing their own representative, because the needs of their own community would be something they had more knowledge of and deserved a say in, more that the concerns of the country as a whole. Even then, however, to suggest that the votes of those illiterate should be considered equal to those of the literate, is rather silly, and that is only one of multiple sets of criteria by which the quality of votes could be weighed. Now we have the idea, come election time, that we are voting for the Prime Minister and Cabinet that will be the next government, not for our representative in the Parliament the makeup of which will determine the next government (note the important difference between these two ways of looking at it). This makes the idea of the universal franchise even less defensible. This obsession with universal voting comes out of the very thought of Rousseau that gave us modern totalitarianism - the idea that if the "general will" of the people could be truly embodied in government, dissent should not be tolerated.

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  2. I hate 'Canada'. The government is NOT the nation, but here in Canada government wants to be everything.

    ‘Canada’ is now just nothing– an empty, exploited shibboleth:

    Government regulation and coercion in Canada is just insane. Why work??? WE have communism. The government control wages and incomes AFTER the fact with taxation. The government takes 50% of everything. If you work hard then it is simply given to someone else by force.

    Democracy has become one vote and 2 minutes of input every four years, followed by government fiat on 10,000 decisions to tax, steal and coerce everything from you for next 4 years–with state force to back it up.

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    1. While the elected part of our Parliamentary system has grown quite corrupt, Mr.Henry, I tend not to think of it in terms of democracy having become something bad. That would suggest that democracy started off as something good. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe put it once "Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else." This is true, and is one of the reasons I place my emphasis on the other two elements of our Parliamentary system.

      I do not hate Canada. I assume that you are familiar with Enoch Powell. Apart from his famous immigration speech (interestingly, given on the same day Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada), he was noted for speaking out against proposed reforms to the House of Lords that would lessen hereditary privilege, for defending the free market and other libertarian concepts against the "post-war consensus" as a Tory backbencher decades before the rise of Thatcherism, and as the Euroskeptic nationalist who so opposed entry to the Common Market that he told people to vote against his own party over it. In the early 1980s,a discussion took place between Powell and Margaret Thatcher, in which the latter talked about the need for high tech weapons to fight for "our values", and Powell told her that it is not values we fight for and that he would fight for Britain even if she had a Communist government. Powell's was, in every way, the more authentic conservative vision.

      Canada is my country, and I refuse to hate Canada just because I despise the present government (in the sense of Prime Minister and Cabinet) and object to the high amount of taxes we pay.

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    2. Hear, Hear. If you said "New Zealand" I would agree for this word for word.

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  3. Dear Neal

    My condolences!

    I would be interested in hearing more of your thoughts concerning the franchise.

    Mark Moncrieff
    Upon Hope Blog

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    1. Thank you, Mr. Moncrieff.

      The ideal of "universal franchise" clearly belongs to the camp of our opponents on the left, being closely related to majoritarianism, egalitarianism, and democracy. The ancients believed that votes must be weighed, not just counted. Modern thought rejects ancient wisdom for a sentimental sense of "fairness" in which one person's vote is equal to every other person's. Yet even now we don't have a restriction-less franchise because only people over a certain age - 18 in Canada - are allowed to vote. This is clearly a reasonable restriction. Countless other restrictions can be defended reasonably. Restricting the vote to those with a demonstrated ability to speak, read, and write one of our national languages is reasonable, because those languages provide access to the information necessary to make an informed vote. Restricting the vote to those who are tax contributors and not tax consumers is also an defensible restriction. A conflict of interest clearly exists when people who receive government pay-cheques, government business contracts, or government social handouts have a say in the government that takes money from other people to give it to them. Unfortunately, our single-payer health system being what it is, this restriction would be impractical having a disenfranchisement rate of 100%.

      Broadening the franchise made a degree of sense back when people had a proper understanding of the Westminster system, how it works, and who they are voting for. Under the system, we vote in a Parliament by choosing representatives for our own constituency, and the make-up of Parliament determines who will become the Crown ministers that form the next government. Most people know the needs, interests, and concerns of the area in which they live better than those of the country as a whole. Therefore, when people understand that they are choosing the next representative of their constituency and not the next Prime Minister, a broader franchise is defensible. The past election, however, demonstrates that people don't understand this any more. It was all about getting rid of or keeping Harper, as if this were an American presidential election. That indicates we are in an era that calls for a narrowing of the franchise.

      Now there are talks about forcing people to vote by fining them if they don't, ironically showing that democracy has nothing to do with freedom, and about proportional representation, the only result of which could possibly be to make Parliament more partisan and ideological than it already is. All of this can be traced back to Rousseau and his concept of the sovereign "general will" to which no dissent will be tolerated. This concept is the foundation of modern democracy and modern totalitarianism, the former being the more respectable face of the latter, and is the essence of our enemy the Left.

      The conservative position, that voting is a privilege not a right, that elected officials possess authority because tradition has vested it in their office and not directly from the will of the people, and that majorities are almost always wrong rather than right, is the voice of the ancient wisdom, built on foundations laid in Athens and Jerusalem, where majorities voted to put Socrates and Jesus to death.

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  4. Sorry that should be Mr. Neal....typo

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  5. Ao much respect for this blog, so much insight.

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