The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Monday Night - Fallingwater

Beaver vs Bear

Sober second thought, eh?

A Conservative senator is urging the country to dump the iconic beaver in favour of the polar bear as an official emblem of Canada, saying the rodent has had its day.

Senator Nicole Eaton, apparently unmoved by the pride of place that Canada has accorded the furry rodent over the years, announced in a statement that it’s time to trade in a “19th-century has-been for a 21st-century hero.”

In parts of Toronto saying that you prefer bear to beaver has certain, ahem, sexual connotations. This being a high class blog we will leave the juvenile humour to others. The high road, that's the road that GCH has travelled these many years. 

To those wondering Senator Eaton was appointed by Stephen Harper, so she is not a Mulroney or Trudeau hold over. She is married to a descendant of the legendary Eaton family. To our American readers, Eaton's was to mid-twentieth century Canada as Sears was to America. Mrs Eaton's qualifications for the Senate are quite, well, senatorial. The usual directorships at the usual worthy organizations, some odd jobs in the media. She is the sort of link to old money Canada that any Tory leader needs to keep up.

The idea, of course, is quite silly. It might be a publicity stunt. It is likely one of those ideas that floats around at a dinner party and the next morning someone actually takes seriously. An idea that should have been allowed to dissipate with the hangover. In a stroke Mrs Eaton may have provided the greatest argument possible of why the Senate needs to be reformed.

The Beaver is Canada! 

 

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

Front Lawn of the Provincial Legislature, Queen's Park

Caledonia Comes to St. James

First they took Oka. 

Then Caledonia.

By the Spring they had occupied High Park.

For the Winter they will have St James Park.

As Christianity spread through out Europe it became common for pagan places of worship to be transformed into Christian churches. Today in Toronto we are witnessing a sort of reverse Christianizing. An Anglican Church is becoming the site of a Mohawk sacred fire. One of the often overlooked details of the Occupy Toronto "protests" is that their main base of operations is located next to one of the country's oldest and largest cathedrals.

In the years past, when the country's Anglican churches were filled every Sunday, such an occupation would have been unthinkable. The police would have rapidly cleared the park. Failing that the army should not have been long in coming. The connection is more than a passing one. For all its faults Christianity acted as an intellectual bulwark of Canadian society.

When it was allowed to collapse nothing was found to replace it. Thus we are left, one of the most successful nations on earth, to stand powerless before drugged hippies and thugs in paramilitary costume. We have the money, the military and police force to defend ourselves and our institutions. We lack only the moral courage to use them.

The occupation of St James Park is illegal. Its rationale is absurd and tragic.  Now the children are leaving to return to their parents basements. Replacing them will be the professionals: The Mohawk Warriors. Their menacing presence was well documented at Oka, Caledonia and the occupation of High Park earlier in the year.

As I noted at the time, the occupation of High Park was a test. Caledonia might be dismissed as a far away place but High Park is on the subway line. A few minutes ride from the provincial legislature the Mohawk Warriors were setting up camp. Appeasement begetting only further appeasement a slice of the downtown core is now literally become Indian Country. That they are piggybacking on a group of granola munching fools is partially an accident. 

While many of the initial "occupiers" of St James Park were useful idiots, their leaders seem to have been quick in finding allies. Knowing that the Children's Army they had lead through the streets would soon dissipate, they wanted some real muscle to make their points. The good burghers of Toronto laughed at the smelly hippies. The power of white liberal guilt is such that no one will be laughing now.

The arrival of the Mohawk Warriors adds a new strategic dimension to the occupation. The police might have risked clearing out a few anemic tramps and sociology majors. They will not dare risk a fight with the Warriors. That would mean real danger. As we saw during the G20 protests, the Toronto Police Service have a natural aversion to enforcing laws that might actually get them hurt. Much safer to beat up unarmed protesters and lay speed traps for middle class soccer moms. 

Having a moral courage the white man lacks, the Warriors have decided to add a touch of panache, if we may call it that, to their trespassing. The lighting of a "sacred fire" in St James Park for the winter is one of those artistic touches one expects from great novelists and master propagandists:

But that plan took a bizarre twist Wednesday when polite and respectful Fleury said “this why we are planning to have a sacred fire, to keep everybody’s hearts warm.”

In fact there is already several large piles of firewood in the park that “people have donated” and more deliveries are expected.

“There needs to be more to have enough to burn all winter,” said “anarchist” Brandon Gray. Come again!

A fire burning in a city park? All winter?

According to the city of Toronto “open air burning is not permitted within the City of Toronto except with approval by the Toronto Fire Services Fire Prevention Division.”

Surely the hell Toronto is not that politically correct to allow squatters special rights to burn a fire to keep warm?

This, said friendly Gray, is where the Mohawk’s come in.

“We wouldn’t break the bylaw but Aboriginals don’t need permits for their sacred fires.”

Ah. No need to concern yourselves with the white man's law. Eloquently flouting the laws of a country whose existence they don't recognize. What few Canadians understand, though they may in the weeks ahead, is that the Mohawks Warriors are not disgruntled fellow citizens. They do not consider themselves to be Canadian. The whole weight of our laws and customs are to them ultra vires, having as much validity as the edicts of a long dead Chinese Emperor. To them the whole of Canada, every square inch, morally belongs to the aboriginal peoples. Everyone else lives at their sufferance. Their land claim is Canada.

He who controls the past controls the future. Mindful of this the Left seized control of the history curriculum decades ago. The dates were not important, nor were specific facts, just a single over arching message: Colonization = Theft. If the very land you stand upon was stolen from someone else, who are you to morally object to their attempts to reclaim it? That before the arrival of the Europeans the land in question was populated by semi-nomadic stone age tribes, who had made little use of it, does not seem to matter. 

The truth that everyone is desperately trying to evade, despite the enormous physical evidence that surrounds St James Park, is that colonization was a good thing. At times brutally carried out, at times not, the European colonization of North America was of incalculable benefit to the descendants of both the aboriginals and Europeans. Many of the tribesmen who terrorized Caledonia would have not lived past childhood without the benefit of western medicine, science and technology.

For millennia various aboriginal tribes lived in Toronto. They altered little the physical landscape of the place. In the two centuries after Simcoe's arrival a great city has been built. What the Mohawk Warriors, the occupiers and their intellectual enablers on the Left wish is to have Toronto and eat it too. To enjoy the benefits of a modern city, even if only camping in a city park, while denying what underpins its greatness.

 

Friday Night - A Star is Born

Heavenly Turns

From TLS:

On the night of February 19, 1604, Johannes Kepler was out measuring the position of Mars in the sky with a metal instrument called a quadrant. It was bitterly cold with a biting wind. Kepler found that if he removed his gloves, his hands were soon too numb to manage his instrument; if he kept them on, he could barely make the fine adjustments necessary. The wind was too strong to keep a candle alight, so he had to read his measurements and write them down by the light of a glowing coal. The results, he felt sure, were unsatisfactory – he was out, he thought, by ten minutes of a degree. On a modern school protractor you cannot distinguish ten minutes of a degree, and only one astronomer before Kepler would have thought such a measurement unsatisfactory. 

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

Princes Blvd, CNE Grounds

Leaning Backward

What a strange crop of conservatives they breed in Quebec:

The Conservative veterans affairs minister says he would have preferred it if the French had won on the Plains of Abraham.

That battle, in 1759, was a significant victory for the British and a milestone on the march to the English conquest of New France.

At an event Tuesday honouring those who fought and died in Canada's name, Blaney told a group of school children he was "a little bit" on the side of French General the Marquis Louis-Joseph de Montcalm.

"I was not there, yet," Blaney told the kids with a chuckle, "but I was a little bit leaning for the French, at that time. And still, today."

So long as it was only a "little bit." Any more and he might have found himself in what's left of the Bloc Quebecois caucus. I know it's Quebec. We must always be sensitive to the feelings of the Quebecois. Albertans, Torontonians and Manitobans may be insulted with impunity but these are lesser Canadians. The French are different from you and me, they are French.

Having a distinct society also means being entitled to an especially thin skin. Point out that Quebec takes more than it contributes to the national fisc? Bigot! Demand that the laws of the Dominion apply to all Canadians equally, without special allowance for Quebec? Anti-French! Expecting a minister of the crown not to retroactively side with one of the Crown's enemies is, therefore, simply too much.

Let's put aside the French and English thing for a moment. New France was the colony of an absolute monarchy, one in which birth mattered far more than merit. Liberty was something intellectuals talked about under the Bourbons. On the other side of the Channel, however, liberty was something people actually lived.

Britain's mid-eighteenth century constitutional monarchy, though regressive by our standards, supported what was the freest political system in the world. There was no greater guarantee in that time than that sweet old phrase "the rights of Englishmen." The funny thing about the English was that they had a strange compulsion to share these liberties with others.

After having decisively beaten the French at Quebec in 1759, part of a string of victories in that Annus mirabilis, the terribly nasty British decided to extend civil liberties to their conquered foes. The Quebec Act of 1774 might have secure that province's allegiance to the crown, but it also helped aggrevate the situation in the thirteen colonies to the south. Had Montcalm, by some miracle, succeed in beating off Wolfe & Co, marched south and captured New York, would the same consideration have been extended to those English subjects?

General James Wolfe was not a conqueror but a liberator and, indirectly, a father of Canada. His exploits at Quebec were a triumph of arms justly celebrated for generations thereafter. The whole of the operations surrounding the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, as well as the overall global strategy of the Empire (masterminded by the Elder Pitt), were a textbook example of organization, skill and daring. 

M. Blaney should not be "leaning" toward Montcalm, the agent of an authoritarian system. It was true that the Canadiens fought bravely in 1759. Yet they had no idea what the future held for them, that British rule would allow them to participate in the creation a great new nation. Their old rights were maintain, new ones added and previously unimagined possibilities opened for all. 

The Minister of Veterans Affairs should follow in the footsteps of Etienne-Cartier and Laurier and declare that 1759 was a short-term disaster that, over the long-term, became a wonderful stroke of luck for the Quebecois. Leave the ethnic tribalism elsewhere. The Battle of Quebec was a victory for all Canadians.

Thursday Night - The Lost Weekend

Something New

Seulement dans la belle province:

Rising Quebec's political star Francois Legault will launch a new party on Nov. 14 after months of speculation.

Mr. Legault made the announcement in Quebec on his final stop of a six week tour of the province.
“People can now stop asking: 'When, when, when? It will be on Nov. 14,” Mr Legault told a crowd of 350 people.

[…]

The new party intends to present a right of centre nationalist program that proposes abolishing school boards, guaranteeing each Quebecker access to a family doctor and more Quebec ownership of the economy.

That's "right of centre" in Quebec, eh? No matter how often you shuffle the deck in Quebec politics you wind up with a straight socialist flush.

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

 

Mackenzie House, Bond Street

The Guilty Men

With Conservatives like these...

“In Canada we have a progressive income tax and it favours people with lower incomes who are vulnerable, quite frankly, in Canadian society. Our tax system is clearly progressive. Having said that I see a point that income distribution is important and that there is a concern that a very, very small group of people have very large incomes.”

Jim Flaherty, Federal Minister of Finance

Once upon a time the children of our fair Dominion were taught that envy was a sin. Today envy is a public policy approach so well entrenched that a "conservative" finance minister thinks nothing of genuflecting toward it. The United States too has a "progressive" income tax system, a fact of which the Minister cannot be ignorant. Perhaps the suggestion is that our system is somewhat more "progressive" than its American equivalent. If that is so, it should not be a point for boasting.

It is a strange understanding of progress that punishes people for, well, progressing. Most high-income earners were once low-income earners. The better they do the more they are punished. Imagine a hockey league where the most successful teams are deducted points to help out the least successful. Our "progressive" income tax system functions in much the same way. It is system that makes sense only to those to whom envy is a virtue. Such is the nature of modern ethics and thus modern politics.

Do not confuse, as too many now do, the issue of progressive taxation with a compassionate attitude toward the unfortunate or incapacitated. They have become entwined in the mind of the public because of the bloated and omnivorous welfare state. If the goal is to ensure that the burden of public finances does not fall too heavily on those barely making ends meet, then the approach should be to reduce consumption taxes on personal necessities: Basic foodstuff, rents up to a certain level and clothing below a certain price point.  

Low-income earners should not be completely exempt from net taxation (they put less into government coffers than they take out). People who pay taxes have a stake in the prudent management of government and will be less likely to view government as Santa Claus. Even a small burden of taxation provides a disincentive to run to the state for unearned benefits. The United States is now approaching a point where more than half of Americans pay no income tax. Once a working majority of the electorate is on the dole the prospects for a market economy, perhaps even liberal democracy itself, become increasingly bleak.

Note the obsession among economists and public policy analysts, including it seems the Minister of Finance, with income inequality. While progressive taxation is sold as compassion to the poor, that is not its goal or practical outcome. That someone has more than you does not make you worse off. That someone else is worse off makes you no better.

In a free society the prosperity of the rich helps the poor, something I can personally attest to having cleaned more than a few upper-middle class homes and offices. Their prosperity helped me improve my well being. Getting government involved, taking its own fat percentage for administration, would not have improved the situation.

A tax system which is truly fair would seek to roughly balance what people take from government with what they pay in. The poor man's life is no better protected than the rich by the police, the courts or the military. It would also not try to take blood from a stone. Burdening people with taxes they cannot pay because of their poverty is unjust. Such an approach would also hamper people's ability to improve their lot. For that latter reason alone having low consumption taxes on certain necessities would be to the advantage of all. 

The progressive income is not fair, it simply punishes the successful. It is not helpful to the poor, since it helps to finance a welfare state that entraps them and reduces opportunity by slowing economic growth. Its ultimate rationale is and has always been envy. The hatred by the many of the success of the few. Why would a minister of the crown, a figure often associated with the political Right, say that it is a concern that "a very, very small group of people have very large incomes.” Should not this sort of rhetoric be kept on the Left?

What drives a nominally conservative politician to preach the gospel of envy is the ethics of altruism. If the ultimate goal of man on this earth is to serve other men, then every dollar required above subsistence morally belongs to someone else. Few people practice altruism consistently, Minister Flaherty is quite fond of high-end business suits for instance, but most people in modern Canada at least partially subscribe to the altruist ideal. This is why few question the morality of the Occupy Wall Street / Bay Street protesters, instead focusing on their economic and historical illiteracy. 

Their morals, however, are as shoddy as their education. The latter having led to the former. If an individual has no moral right to what he or she has earned, if all our possessions are held at the sufferance of the "poor"or "society," there can be no proper defence of capitalism. Jim Flaherty genuflected to the politics of envy because he felt guilty. Many of those on Bay Street, who have given half-hearted excuses to the mob at their door step, do so out of that same guilt. Who are we to earn millions while others earn pennies? 

The guilt of the rich, the envy of the poor and ethics of altruism that binds them together is a threat to our freedom. The rich will not properly defend what they have unless they feel a moral right to it. The poor will not stop feeling envious so long as they believe they have a moral right to the unearned. A morality of altruism, too often confused with simple compassion, perpetuates this vicious system. 

The appropriate response to the mobs at St James Park and Bay Street is this: Get haircut, get an education and get a real job. No one here owes you anything.

 

Wednesday Night - Forbidden Planet

A Price Too High for the TTC

From the Red Star:

I work three days a week, and lately I’ve been staying late at the office to get extra work done. That’s when I realized how much faster driving was. I can leave the office at 8:00 p.m., and be standing in my living room 30 minutes later (40 minutes if there's traffic or if I stop to pick up a couple of things at the grocery store.)

Instead of coming home well after bedtime and exhausted from a long commute, I get home still wide awake and in time to kiss my girls goodnight.

Unless you are within walking distance of the subway, using public transit makes no sense. Unless, that is, your time is of very low value. That's not even taking into account your fellow passengers on the TTC. Is the usage of soap some kind of human rights violation these days?

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

 

Church Street and Gould Street