Revolt of the Canadians

It was the fifth or sixth time I saw Ezra Levant tearing so beautifully, so brilliantly into the shrinking figure of Shirlene McGovern that the sheer entertainment value began to wane.  No longer was I witnessing the spectacle of a freeman standing up to an unjust authority, an image half out of Schiller and half out of Ayn Rand, but the opening moments of a revolution, or more accurately a counter-revolution.  Finally someone with the capacity, the will and the intelligence to fight back was doing so and in exactly the right way. 

This week another unexpected victory.  An officer teaching at the Royal Military College at Kingston, Canada's West Point, saw his legal challenge dismissed by a federal court.  The officer's complaint was that he was forced to swear allegiance to Her Majesty.  Beaverbrook, impresario of The Monarchist, has dubbed this traitor in uniform "Captain Chutzpah."  A Canadian officer, serving under the Queen's commission, refusing to toast the Queen is one of those bits of beyond satire absurdity that are daily fare in Trudeaupia.  As many others I half expected this traitor to succeed, pleading for justice under that inversion of rights and freedoms known as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  It's the stupid Charter as Ezra used to say.  A Canadian judge, however, found that the laws of Canada still stand, whatever fictions might be read into Section One.  Our sovereign is still Queen Elizabeth the Second of that name, fount of law and honour, Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces.  Wishing otherwise and pleading injury will not work.   Oh, what horrors this poor man has suffered in honouring his monarch! The wretched of the earth do bleed in sympathy.  Christian mercy for this sad fellow! 

As news arrived that the we had not became a de facto Republic by court order and Charter challenge, we learned that a government panel, commissioned by the Prime Minister, had judged our efforts in Afghanistan worthy and true, though imperfect.  There was talk of us playing hardball with our NATO allies, threatening to pull out unless they put up.  There was talk of more reconstruction.  There was very little talk of surrender and withdrawal.  The good Canadian, the choir invisible has told us, is a peacekeeper.  We see daily in Afghanistan that we are still a nation that can produce warriors.  Virtually all of Europe has become enervated, yet still we have, however small and improvised, a real fighting force.  The martial virtues kept alive in defiance of all expectation and the devout wish of the pacifists who have controlled our foreign policy for two generations.

Our freedoms, our crown and our armed forces.  These were once cornerstones of our identity.  The Pearson-Trudeau project has seen each weakened in an attempt to create a post-colonial identity, one based on the faddish notions of the 1960s.  The efforts to unanchor us from our history, its best and worst elements, to return us to a tabula rasa where a new Canada was to be created, seemed to most conservatives to be a success.  Those who doubted the wisdom of the neo-Jacobins were a small minority of the those too old to adapt and too young to know better. 

We have seen in the span of a week three small but powerful instances of the best of the old Canada reasserting herself.  Invoking the Magna Carta used to be a defense attorney cliche; when Ezra spoke it had all the feeling of radical defiance.  Justice Barnes' insistence that Canada was still a monarchy read not like a platitude and instead came down with the power of prophecy.  The Manley Report chastised the Conservative government for not supporting the mission strongly enough, for not explaining more clearly and forcefully our reasons and goals.  A war-time government was not being martial enough.  I do not delude myself to the nature of the task ahead.  Still what we have seen are flashes in the dark.  They give us bearing and comfort.  They remind us that Henry Hazlitt was not wrong when he promised that one day time would run back.