The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Film Review: John A: Birth of A Country

The DVD has sat on my table for sometime: John A: Birth of A Country. It had been shown on the Mother Corp last September, after very little promotion. Still, I felt it was my obligation to watch the film. Eventually. I'd been eyeing the case warily. On it's spine the mark of Cain: CBC Home Video.

Would this be another piece of taxpayer subsidized statist propaganda? Something along the lines of the Tommy Douglas (also written by Bruce M Smith) and Pierre Trudeau mini-series of recent years. Would Sir John be making an impassioned speech about multiculturalism? Perhaps Alexander Galt would tell us about the necessity of socialized health care. I was dreading to watch the thing.

I was pleasantly surprised.

While I can't offer the very strong praise given by Andrew Coyne, I was still impressed with the overall product. Having spent some years researching this specific period, and in particular the relationship between the main protagonists, John A Macdonald and George Brown, I spent much of the film complaining about minor historical inaccuracies. To put it simply, the whole thing makes John A look too good and George Brown not good enough.

Still, it's 90 minutes compressing eight years of very eventful history. There is easily enough material in the decade before Confederation for a mini-series with no shortage of action, intrigue or political thrills. In some ideal alternate Canada the budget and time could be found for a John Adams style epic encompassing the more than quarter century long relationship between Brown and Macdonald.

Even with its relatively limited scope the film was in desperate need of another half-hour. There is so much to get through that the characters and events get rushed. The actors are burdened with obviously expository speeches. If Canadians were not so pitifully ignorant of their own history this would not be as necessary. A good thirty minutes into the film and I wouldn't be surprised if half the audience was still wondering if George Brown was the guy who founded the college. 

He wasn't. It was just named in his honour.

The writer and director are trying to juggle many balls and they handle them about a deftly as can be expected. Given the restraints placed upon the film's creators, the product is quite impressive. When the drama lags it is because it is giving way to the history, when the history weakens it is giving way to the drama. That's the hard trade off involved in making historical films. Tightening the scope even further, focusing just on the months leading up to the Great Coalition of 1864, might have mitigated these problems.

Dr Fothkenstein

It's alive! I think?

I assayed the obvious candidates and advised that Jack Horner was too stupid and Paul Hellyer was too stubborn and Joe Clark was too young and yada-yada. If the Tories had any brains, I advised - as they had shown they hadn't - they would figure out that the reason they had been shut out of power in Ottawa for most of the century was that they could never break into Quebec.

Why not, I suggested, take a flyer on someone I had never met but had been keeping an eye on from afar. Name of Brian Mulroney, fluently bilingual, good record as a prominent Montreal lawyer who had achieved television attention as a star on the Cliché Commission of Inquiry into Union Corruption.

The birth of the legend.

All writers, even lowly unpaid bloggers, have fantasies that something they write changes the world. Alan Fotheringham taking credit for "inventing" Brian Mulroney seems to be part of that fantasy. This is not to say that Dr Foth does not have a point. His plug back in the mid-1970s certainly helped the Brian's career. Had the one time backpage prophet not noticed the lowly Mulroney, however, it's likely the future PM would have made his way to Sussex Drive.

While still in university Brian Mulroney was giving John Diefenbaker advice on Quebec politics. That alone suggests a fair measure of skill and ambition in the dark political arts. There are few people in Canada, then or now, who can work a room like the Brian. The boy from Baie-Comeau was going places. A little help from the good doctor no doubt helped. Saying that he "invented" Brian Mulroney is a bit of good old fashioned Irish bullshit, to use his terminology.

Not that I'm adverse to Irish bullshit. My ancestors were from the mainland, so the Celtic gift for the gab is a bit alien. Still, I admire people who practice their art at a high level. Dr Foth is an Irish bullshitter and so was Brian Mulroney. That's why I liked them both. The problem with Canada's traditional WASPocracy was its dull worthiness. It's why people were magnetically attracted to Diefenbaker and Trudeau, two non-WASPs who added colour to the political landscape.

No one would ever confuse Mulroney with Dief or PET. He was too smooth and too nouveau riche. For a time he did charm the people of Canada. Winning one of the greatest electoral landslides in Canadian history, especially with the overwhelming support of la belle province, requires charm. Getting along with Ronald Reagan as well he did required a special Irish charm. Chide we may, yet let us not underestimate what Irish charm has done for Canada, from D'Arcy McGee through to Brian Mulroney.

Sir John, Sir Wilfrid and Sir Robert: Two Elections and Three Prime Ministers

There are few subjects less fashionable in modern historiography than political history. The even narrower field of Canadian political history is, in this already unpromising context, akin to a bow-tie at a rap concert. It is therefore not surprising that the bright young things of our history departments, understandably desirous of those rare tenure track spots, shy away from these seemingly staid areas of research.

Into this bleak landscape we see the happy arrival of the 2011 book season, filled to the brim with good political historical cheer. While I will be trying to cover as many of these works as I can before Christmas, schedule permitting, I felt it was best to start off with these two very promising titles: The Destiny of Canada: Macdonald, Laurier and the Election of 1891 by Christopher Pennington and Canada 1911: The Decisive Election That Shaped the Country by Patrick Dutil and David MacKenzie.

We have here not merely political history but electoral history as well! Clio is indeed merciful and kind. One of the central protagonists in both books is Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Canada's most elegant and famous espouser of the classical liberal creed. More than being a passing coincidence the two works act as nearly perfect book ends to Laurier's career as Liberal Party leader. 1891 was Laurier's first campaign as the Grit Chief, matching wits with Sir John A himself. Almost exactly twenty years later the aging statesman would again be defeated by the Tories, this time under the leadership of the indefatigable Sir Robert Borden. 

In these two works we are allowed to walk with three giants of Canadian history, with Laurier serving as the crucial link between the other two. These two elections were both fought over the issue of a free trade agreement, reciprocity in the language of the day, with the United States. More than merely a trade deal, arguments over the wisdom of signing a deal with the Yankees were laced with questions of national identity. As the campaigns unfolded the traditional trip wires of Canadian political life appeared: the Anglo-French divide, the Protestant-Catholic divide, the West & Maritimes vs Central Canada and the question of Canada's place in the world.

"I had the whole third floor ripped out"

Who says academics aren't decisive? 

Jack Granatstein still remembers the surprise that awaited him when he was appointed director of the Canadian War Museum in 1998. During a visit to the museum he was shown the various displays of Canada's military history, including, of course, those devoted to the First and Second World Wars. The third floor, however, held an unwelcome surprise.

"The entire floor had been turned into a gallery on peacekeeping," Granatstein recalls. 

[...]

The historian takes a dim view of this willingness to bend to the popular mind. "I had the whole third floor ripped out and put in NATO and NORAD."

That might have been the best executive decision made in Ottawa in the last twenty years. As someone who also takes a dim view of the Cult of Peacekeeping, I was practically cheering when I read the above. We have a military to fight. They're rather good at it. The Canadian military did not peace keep up Vimy Ridge, onto Juno Beach or around the arid wastes of Kandahar. To imagine otherwise is at best naive and at worst dishonest.

This is not to say that peacekeeping is irrelevant or invalid. There are times when conflict can be avoided, or wound down, if an honest third party aids the process. Boots on the ground can often help a delicate process like peacemaking along. Canadians have played that honourable role in the past. If circumstances warrant we should do so again. Peacekeeping, however, is not an end in and of itself. 

To actually "keep the peace" requires certain preconditions:

1) The involved parties are sincere in wanting peace

2) The involved parties trust the third party to act in good faith

3) There is an actual peace to protect.

If any of those conditions are not meet then peacekeepers become lighted armed targets in blue berets. This was the case in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the mid-1990s. In the years since Canada's involvement in peacekeeping has been quite minimal. We have spent the last decade engaged in counter-insurgency efforts, something which Canadian forces have not done since the time of the Boer War. Even in that long ago conflict our efforts were mostly in conventional campaigns.

Canadian military history essentially revolves around fighting or preparing to fight. Peacekeeping is largely a footnote. That's why Professor Granatstein had the third floor of the Canadian War Museum ripped out. Had the Warsaw Pact's militaries made a dash through the Fulda Gap, it's unlikely that peacekeeping would have been an effective counter-strategy.

Yet as the article notes the myth of Canadians as peacekeepers, though somewhat diminished by the Afghanistan campaign, remains in the national psyche. Its origins lie in the twining of those two great forces of modern Canada: Leftist utopianism and our national inferiority complex relative the Americans.

The utopianism is easy enough to spot. Fighting is so primitive and dirty. Surely we can come together in peace and friendship? That's the enlightened approach. The logical flaw of pacifism is that it relies on the whole world being pacifists. The roots of war are not misunderstanding, fear and ignorance, they are tyranny and a desire for plunder. You cannot talk tyrants away from their goals, unless supported by force of arms.

The inferiority complex manifests itself more subtly. We are peacekeepers and therefore enlightened. But enlightened compared to who? Since we are situated next to the greatest military power in human history the answer is geographical. To compensate for our smallness the more neurotic nationalists must seek out ways for us to exhibit our moral superiority over the Americans. No matter how foolish, absurd or non-historical those ways become.

Peacekeeping is less a policy and more an expression of Trudeaupian Canada. A nation freed from historical imperatives, such as internal and external security, and allowed to indulge in fantasies about how the world should work. That freedom, however, is paid for through American generosity. As Mark Steyn has noted what allows Trudeaupian Canada to be Trudeaupian is the American taxpayer. Not the strongest pillar of support in this day and age.

In the last decade, partly by chance and partly by necessity, the Canadian public has been shown their military as a fighting force. The image of benign looking Canadians patrolling Third World war zones has been replaced by camouflaged infantry firing upon enemy positions. Time cannot allow this new image, really an old image being restored, to fade.

Modern Canada may have been created in the universities but it is sustained in the public schools. Generations of school children have been taught the narrative of Canadians as peacekeepers, a narrative as at odds with our history as it is with life in much of the world. As time passes those who set our curriculum will try to fade the name of Afghanistan as they did the name of Korea. They should sorely like to fade the two world wars from our history, and everything that they imply, but those events are too large to be ignored. 

Ripping out a false bit of revisionist history in one museum is certainly a good start. Ripping out the conceits of four decades worth of revisionist history from the hearts and minds of Canadians will be much harder, as well as far more necessary. 

A Mere Matter of Gloating

When our side won. Sort of:

“This is meant to remind Canadians of the importance of the War of 1812 in the development of Canada.”

While it will celebrate historical icons such as Isaac Brock and Laura Secord, the government is preparing to play up the relative lack of conflict with the United States since. In more than one news release on remembering the war, the Tories also mention “two centuries of peaceful co-existence with the United States” that followed.

Canadian military historian Jack Granatstein predicts anti-American sentiment will nevertheless be stirred up – through no fault of the Harper government.

“I think this is going to turn into an anti-American festival, no matter what the government does.”

For most Americans the War of 1812 is a historical footnote. A stop over between Washington holding off the Redcoats and Sherman finishing off the Rebs. It is a war badly remember because of what happened next, a century of spectacular growth that saw a baker's dozen collection of ex-colonies emerge as a global superpower. When you go from zero to superhero, the minor hiccups tend to get overlooked.

Not so on this side of the Great Lakes basin. It was a formative event. Upper Canada, where much of the fighting occurred, was sparsely populated, about 76,000 white settlers in what is now southern Ontario. Less than the population of New York City at the time. Contrary to subsequent mythologizing the defence of Canada was mostly carried out by professional British soldiers. The country's survival largely rested on the skill and aggressiveness of Sir Isaac Brock, much of the civilian and military administration of the country having become defeatist even before the war began.

In the half century between Brock's death at Queenston Heights and Confederation the province grew rapidly, reaching a population of 1.5 million. As a new nationality formed it sought out its own myths and heroes. Brock was ready made for the role. A martyr to Crown and Country who fell to save Canada from the machinations of the American invaders. When Alexander Muir penned The Maple Leaf Forever, he naturally included references to the War of 1812.

Of all the heroes of pre-1960s, Isaac Brock has probably fared the best in the public consciousness. It is not that most Canadians know even the most cursory details of his accomplishments. In the modern Canadian mind Brock survives as the name of a second-tier university, and as a man who beat Americans. To the choir invisible of Canadian Left-wing opinion that just about makes up for his shortcomings; his Britishness and profession as a soldier. 

Professor Granatstein is sadly right. The bicentennial of the War of 1812 will see much American bashing in Canada. There will be little discussion of the genuine grievances the young American Republic had against the British Empire, or Britain's contemporaneous fight against Napoleonic France. Even less of the role of Britain in protecting the infant colony and ensuring its ultimate survival. History is muddling and there was quite a lot of muddling in 1812. Such nuance will be beyond our intellectual class. American bad. Canadian good.

 

The Wars of the Tribes

The Cult of Multicult reaches contradiction:

The Toronto District School Board says it is meeting its obligation to accommodate students’ religious beliefs by allowing an imam to lead students in prayer on school property.

The board came under fire this week when a Hindu group that regularly criticizes Islam raised objections to Friday Muslim prayer sessions, which have been held inside a cafeteria at Valley Park Middle School in Flemingdon Park for about three years.

The impressive fact of this story is not that a Muslim group asked for special privileges, or that the Toronto District School Board folded to their demands, it's who is opposing this little breach in the separation of mosque and state. Not the descendants of Simcoe and Champlain. Nope. They're the ones who caved in for fear of being called the "R" word. They even invoked the Trudeau Charter for political cover. It's a Hindu association and a group of secularly minded Muslims. Welcome to modern Canada, where the immigrants are saving us from the immigrants. 

Nor are the anti-prayer groups defending their actions on religious lines. They are upholding good old fashioned separation of church and state principles. Somewhere George Brown is smiling. This story serves as a fascinating parallel to how religious freedom was established in this country. In the 1840s, after decades of sectarian wrangling, the various protestant churches reached an informal agreement that no church would have special government privileges. The public schools would be run along broadly secular lines, with religious instruction kept to Christian generalities. In time even this was dropped.

Unfortunately the French-Canadian Catholics failed to get the memo, and were obstinate in having their own government funded schools. To stay in power John A Macdonald cut a deal, as he so often did, to placate the sensibilities of the more militant of the two solitudes, plus the Irish Catholics who were becoming electorally important. That dangerous precedent has made it harder to oppose demands from other religious groups.

Government financed Catholic Schools are a sad exception to this country's mostly firm commitment to keeping public money out of religious hands. Luckily this group of Hindus and liberal Muslims have followed the path of free church men like George Brown, and not religious rent seekers like Bishop Strachan. 

Witness this bit of loveliness:

But Ron Banerjee, director of Canadian Hindu Advocacy, said his group has received support both from Hindus and non-Hindus who say the TDSB is going too far.

Islamic groups are “imposing their view and trying to change the rules, regulations, norms and values to accommodate themselves, and in the long-term, to spread their ideology,” he said.

“….Pretty soon we’re going to have 50 different ethnicities and religions asking for different accommodations.”

Let be me blunter than usual. If a white man, to say nothing of a white Christian, said the above he'd be immediately branded as a racist, even though this is a religious issue. Racist being the modern PC word for evil-doer. Why are two groups of relative newcomers to the Canadian "mosaic" putting in a firmer fight than the old stock Canadians? Because multiculturalism has precious little traction among most immigrant groups. Someone escaping from the South Asian caste system has a very firm understanding of the dangers of cultural relativism. There are certainly race or ethnic hustlers among these groups, but most are glad enough to be in a safe and civilized country. 

For reasons owing to the pretzel logic of political correctness, these non-European immigrant groups can, with some safety, attack multiculturalist inspired surrenders of our institutions. While all cultures are the same for the multiculturalist, those of the Europeans are less same than others. Thus a white man criticizing this affront to our traditions is a racist. A brown man doing the same is contributing to our intercultural dialogue. You can't call a non-white person a bigot, since only white people can be bigots. The contradictions inherent in the system will lead to its destruction.

For years people on the Canadian Right have quietly mumbled about the unassimilable nature of the new immigrant classes. Since this has been a complaint directed at every immigrant group to arrive in this country since the Irish Catholics showed up, I've generally taken the whole thing with a shrug. What about the radical Muslims! Yes, what about them. This country played a not inconsiderable role in beating back fascism and communism. Yet a group of primitive fanatics is going to do us in?

The enemies of free and civilized life are quite weak. Whatever strength they have comes from the cowardice of our intellectual and political elite, most of whom are of old stock descent. Their families have been here for generations, they are too ignorant and riven with self-doubt to defend the accomplishments of their ancestors. Thankfully for us, some of the "new Canadians" are ready to step into the breach. 

In Days of Yore

From one Tory patronage master to another:

Longer answer: Yes, but not for more than a century, which is why Canadians -- even Canadian political history junkies -- can be forgiven for not instantly recalling the senators who, for various and sundry reasons, gave up their Senate seats, only to be subsequently reappointed to the Red Chamber -- in some cases, within days. 

All five were appointed by Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, and their names, in order of initial appointment, were James Cox Aikins, James Skead, George Howlan, John-Rodrigue Masson and John Carling. 

These are their stories.      

I'm mightily impressed that such a detailed bit of Canadiana has found its way into the MSM. The article - by Press Galley veteran Kady O'Malley - gives a pretty good glimpse of politics in Victorian Canada. For those who find themselves hooked I can recommend Donald Creighton's two volume door stopper on John A. The less ambitious can contend with Richard Gwyn's more recent - though incomplete - effort. For a more free market and individualist politician check out JMS Careless' classic two volumes on George Brown. 

A Piece of the Action

One of the biggest reasons why it is so hard to shrink government:

According to Statistics Canada, 5.7 million Canadians over 15 got at least half their income from government transfers in 2008. (They don't collect figures on those 15 or under.) That's 21.4%. In case you're wondering how the picture changes if you consider children, StatsCan also provided numbers broken down by family, and the number there is 3.4 million families or an almost identical 21.3% of the total population.

[...]

If you add the 3.6 million Canadians who work in the public sector to the 5.7 million who depend primarily on the state for non-employment income, you get 9.3 million or 35% of those over 15. That means one in three of us is riding while the other two push.

As one of the pushers - so to speak - I'm naturally disinclined to perpetuate the process. This being a democracy it's unlikely I'll get my way. Was it always like this? Well no. Once upon a time Sir John A Macdonald remarked that: "We must protect the rights of minorities, and the rich are always fewer in number than the poor." This was supposedly said during the Quebec Conference in 1864. This is the sort of thing he had in mind.

I've always been rather fond of that quote. For years I was dutifully taught in school that Canada is, and had always been, a quasi-socialist, semi-frozen multicultural folk fest. I didn't quite buy it then. Once I got access to a first class library - the University of Toronto's John P Robarts to be exact - I was able to pick up history books written before the 1960s. My granny, what an interesting country you had there.

Here was the Old Canada in all its peculiar glory. No bloody civil wars and only a minimal amount of slavery, still very politically incorrect. I don't mean that minorities were treated rather badly. So they were. On the whole being snubbed in Toronto was better than being lynch in Mississippi, or pogromed in Russia. What struck me was how the historical record so thoroughly debunked the myth of socialist Canada. A few years back Brian Lee Crowley wrote a book on this point. Mining the data he realized that until Pearson's day America was the relatively more statist country. 

Putting aside the dry economics stuff there were the Fathers of Confederation. Supreme in his irreverence was John A himself. I cannot imagine such a being surviving in modern politics. His conservatism - in the old British Tory sense - would have irked everyone. The rampant corruption he presided over would have given copy for legions of investigative journalists. Jacques Parizeau was roundly criticized in 1995 for being seen on camera with a drink. Our first Prime Minister would often show up drunk in the House of Commons. As I've often noted in this space, John A accomplished more drunk than any of his successors did sober.

It can be argued that the modern welfare state is simply an outgrowth of the Victorian patronage state. Rather than bribing a few hundred key political power brokers, the welfare state bypasses the middle man and directly delivers the lucre to the people. That is if you exclude the fat margin the bureaucracy takes off the top to administer the whole thing. The goal, however, is different. Patronage was just bribery. It served a political function but was hardly dressed up as a moral ideal. 

The presumption behind the welfare state - and putting a third of population on the government payroll - is that government had to remedy the ills of daily life. Hard luck and bad judgement are not to be managed by people muddling through with the help of friends, family and charity. Such improvisation would be undignified for the post-1960s Canadian. The modern welfare state seeks to guaranteed what cannot be guaranteed, perfect security in the travails of life. 

Matched with the welfare state is the regulatory state. It too seeks to remove the uncertainty of life. The promise made by its operators is of safe food, safe services and even safe fun. There is, however, no such thing as perfect safety. All actions have a risk and return. Government placing an arbitrary line on where that balance needs to be struck simply takes away choice and responsibility from the citizen. 

John A was too imperfect to have survived in modern politics. So were his political beliefs. He promised practical goals. Railroads and prosperity not safety from illness and old age. Protective tariffs not mandatory bicycle helmets. For his time he was a statist politico, matching his wits with sober free marketers like George Brown and Alexander Mackenzie. Yet all of them would have thought a government that promised all things to all men daft, dangerous and unBritish. 

Those who control the past, as Orwell observed, control the future. Teach two generations of Canadians that we've always been a kinder and gentler version of America - i.e. more statist version of the Yankee original - and it becomes easier to convince voters that having a third of the population living off the other two-thirds is perfectly normal. Our first Prime Minister once observed that the electorate would prefer him drunk to George Brown, his main rival, sober. He was proven right more than once. A century and a half onward I'd prefer either men in any state of inebriation. The most drunken of our Victorian forerunners could hardly have imagined the modern Leviathan. 

Anarchy in the Park

As noted on Tuesday, a group of aboriginals has occupied a section of Toronto's High Park. Ho-Hum. One of my hobby-horses is the idea of a slippery slope. You allow a certain thing to happen. A precedent gets created. Soon a very small thing becomes a very big thing. The welfare state began in much the same way with old age pensions. Who could object to giving money to old poor people? Then the next step was the Baby Bonus. Who could object to giving money to young families? Especially when we already give money to old folks. Three generations on we are facing fiscal insolvency of a scale usually only seen in the wake of a major military defeat. 

We are now speeding down another very slippery slope, the aboriginal extortion racket. It began - so far as Canada is concerned - at the time of Oka. Gingerly we passed by other landmarks such as Ipperwash and most importantly Caledonia. We have reached another landmark in the occupation of High Park. To put this in perspective High Park is about 8km from Queen's Park. It was easy for Torontonians to shrug their shoulders during the Caledonia Crisis. After all, Hamilton is a far away place. High Park is on the subway line.

There is so far no proof that an aboriginal burial ground lies beneath that section of High Park, or indeed anywhere in the area. Even should one be discovered it does not therefore follow that such land, used for well over a century now as a city park, should revert to its former usage. As Michael Coren points out an Oxford college is built over a medieval Jewish cemetery. Let the dead bury the dead.

The ancient burial ground is merely a pretext. In fact the Indian burial ground is the most cliched of pretexts. Nearly impossible to prove and possessing the magic force of white liberal guilt. You hear the indignant cries: "How would like us to build over your grandmother's grave?" Well I actually met one of my grandmothers. I have no idea who my great-great-great-great-grandmother was and neither do most people. Anyone buried in High Park would not even have that close a relation to the occupiers. Put it another way. If tomorrow morning old Publius was to drive down to the US and occupy the building site of an aboriginal casino, claiming on specious grounds that the graves of white people would be disturbed, how far would I get?

Racial solidarity is a nasty thing. Ayn Rand once described racism as barnyard collectivism. A collectivism so primitive and irrational that it could appeal only to the most backward of mindsets. The link between the Mohawk Warriors and the Mississauga aboriginals who once lived in Toronto is at best tenuous. In centuries past these tribes slaughter each other with little regret. They did so long before a European language was spoken on these shores. 

For extortion to work a threat must be placed over the victim. Since the aboriginal tribes ceased being a serious military threat to European settlement of this continent more than two centuries ago, the threat is of a different nature. Certainly these "protestors" can be quite disruptive to civilized life, especially in a dense urban environment. A nation capable of fielding - for nearly a decade now - a credible military force on the other side of the world is more than capable of disarming a few dozen thugs. The local police forces could easily do so with the resources at their disposal. Or are the SWAT teams solely for the closure of marijuana grow-ops?

From the Premier of Ontario - arguably the second most powerful man in Canada - down to the beat cops in Caledonia or High Park, a force far more powerful than any army holds sway. It is the power of moral superiority. The aboriginal occupiers lack everything, except the moral certainty that what they are doing is just and proper. The modern Canadian state possess everything except moral certainly. Confronted with the presence of posturing thugs it surrenders cravenly. Why? Because it believes them to be possessed of moral superiority over the remainder of Canadian society. They are a special class apart from other Canadian citizens.

This moral pretence is born of a distorted historical narrative. Accordingly to this narrative - taught diligently in the schools for at least two generations now - the North American continent was a primeval paradise whose inhabitants lived in peace and harmony for millennia. Into this Eden, populated by Rousseau like Noble Savages, entered the rapacious and wicked Europeans. The pale face stole, murdered and cheated the aboriginals out of their birthright. Since it is now impossible to restore "Turtle Island" to its pre-Columbian past, the occasional surrender of territory and the annual expenditure of billions of dollars are acts of partial atonement.

The historical reality is rather less stark. Yes the Europeans were at times quite rapacious. So were the aboriginals. The Myth of the Conquest perpetuated by academics and aboriginal grievance mongers is of their simple, naive and trusting ancestors outwitted and overwhelmed by European settlers. Nothing could be less true and more insulting to the aboriginals of that time. They were overwhelmed certainly but hardly cheated. The economic value of the land they surrendered became great only after it was developed by European settlers. It had previously sustained a few thousand individuals at an extremely low level of development for millennia. After the arrival of the Europeans Canada could sustain a population of 34 million with one of the highest living standards in history. 

The network of treaties established under the auspices of the Crown - and later the Dominion government of Canada - were not a snare to catch unwary aboriginals. Had the British Empire so wished it could have easily displaced the aboriginal population without the pretext of a treaty. Thousands of Acadians were moved by force only a few decades earlier. The British had the means but preferred to negotiate. Why? Because they were attempting to secure the new continent for settlement in the most peaceful and civilized way possible. A manner largely alien to the conduct of the aboriginal tribes.

They hoped in time the aboriginal populations would be absorbed into the new colonial societies. This hope - whatever we may think of it today - was grounded not in malice but benevolence. It was better to live in a modern society than in a stone age culture. That today's aboriginal "protestors" forsake few of the technological and economic benefits of western societies, while denouncing the ideas that allow such societies to exist, is a testament to the superiority of the cultures that displaced their ancestors. To those not blinded by the myth of the noble savage, there is a darkly amusing irony in modern day bigots attacking the crimes of the "white man" while speaking on a cell phone and using a laptop.

The goal of the High Park "protestors" is not land. It is to decisively establish in practice what has already been established intellectually in the minds of many Canadians. That the whole this country morally belongs to the aboriginal peoples. The rest of us live here by their sufferance. What Canadian society pays to the aboriginals will no longer be treaty obligations, or our pity for the state of the aboriginal, no it shall be rent. And who shall collect that rent? Why the leadership of the aboriginal people. Not necessarily the legally defined leadership of these tribes, instead it will be parallel powers like the Mohawk Warriors. We shall now live at the gracious permission of these new tribal chieftains. Welcome to the bottom of the slippery slope.

 

Historic Places

A new website for Canadian history aficionados. Those few of us still left:

Parks Canada, which celebrates its centennial this year, recently launched the Canadian Register of Historic Places website at www.historicplaces.ca.

“A decade ago, you couldn’t find this information without spending months of research,” says Andrew Waldron, Canadian registrar of historic places.

“Once you start browsing, the impact is quite amazing,” he says. “The churches, factories, forts, railway stations … it gives you an awesome sense of what’s out there.”

The register is considered to be a definitive inventory of historic places whose heritage value has been recognized by a government authority.

These include buildings, structures, engineering works, districts, landscapes and archaeological sites.

These historical places are of varying importance. How many people are really interested in knowing that the oldest intact latrines in Canada are located at Fort Wellington National Historic Site in Prescott, Ontario? Of more importance is the home of George Brown in downtown Toronto. It would have been nice, however, if they would have doubled checked the date of his death. He died in 1880 not 1881. Then again the historical plaque at the George Brown house indicates his date of birth as 1819 not 1818. Yeah, I'm stickler for this kind of thing. Used to drive my history teachers nuts.

A Drunk's A Drunk For all That

Where the elite set sauced:

When former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin were in power, D’Arcy McGee’s was the “unofficial playground of Parliament Hill,” longtime manager Jeff O’Reilly said over a pint of beer. The pub is still a mainstay among Ottawa insiders, but business slowed after a rumoured 2006 edict by the Prime Minister’s Office urging Conservative staffers to avoid the spot.

On a Tuesday night in January, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and party loyalists spilled over to the bar after a soiree at the National Arts Centre. A week later, the pub’s clientele defied party lines with a ‘Welcome Back to the Hill Party,’ which was thrown by a pair of lobby groups and swimming with a cross-section of MPs and staffers.

Hardly the Athenaeum, the Carlton or the Reform club. 

On a side note. One of my favourite John A Macdonald stories is of him saying to D'Arcy McGee: "this Government can't afford two drunkards - and you've got to stop." Rather appropriate that they should name a pub after McGee. For the record, McGee did many other things beyond being John A's drinking buddy and getting shot.

 

The First Right

The program of [classical] liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production (for in regard to commodities ready for consumption, private ownership is a matter of course and is not disputed even by the socialists and communists). All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand.

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism (1929), pg. 19

Why are property rights not part of our Constitution? Answer: opposition from the provinces and the federal NDP. In 1978, when drafting its proposal for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the federal Liberal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau included a guarantee to "the right of the individual to the use and enjoyment of property, and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with law."

Two years later, however, when negotiations on a new constitution began in earnest, the provinces strongly opposed this section, fearing it would limit their ability to tax and expropriate. Wording was added to the effect that "reasonable compensation" could be offered in exchange for deprivation, and that "Nothing in this section precludes the enactment of or renders invalid laws controlling or restricting the use of property in the public interest or securing against property the payment of taxes or duties or other levies or penalties." But even this new language failed to mollify provincial opposition, and Mr. Trudeau eventually scrapped the section entirely.

National Post, February 25, 2011

Yes, you read that right. Pierre Trudeau was less hostile to private property rights than the provincial premiers, including many "conservative" governments. Randy Hillier and Scott Reid, two of the very few genuinely pro-freedom politicians left in the country, are fighting to include private property rights in our constitution. That might seem a political Hail Mary pass. No one in their right mind would want to reopen the constitution. Instead Hillier and Reid are planning on using an obscure section of the Constitution to amend it.

Scott Reid, MP (Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington) and Randy Hillier, MPP (Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington) will jointly present resolutions in the House of Commons and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to amend Canadas Constitution, embedding property rights for Ontarians within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If passed in both legislatures, the resolutions will, under the terms of the amending formula in Section 43 of the Constitution Act, 1982, become part of the Constitution of Canada.

Section 43 reads:

An amendment to the Constitution of Canada in relation to any provision that applies to one or more, but not all provinces, including

(a) any alteration to boundaries between provinces, and

(b) any amendment to any provisions that relate to the use of the English or the French language within a province

may be made by proclamation issued by the Governor General under the Great Seal of Canada only where so authorized by resolutions of the Senate and House of Commons and of the legislative assembly of each province to which the amendment applies.

It's an interesting tactic. I'm looking forward to the reaction of Stephen Harper and Tim Hudak to the proposed resolution. If they have a conservative bone left in their pragmatic hides they'll support it without reservations. What if the opposition blocks the motion? Fine. Let the parliamentary record show that the Liberals, NDP and Bloc are opposed to property rights - just in case you were in doubt - and used their stance as a club to beat them senseless in the next election. Win the election by losing on a parliamentary vote. The same thing could be done with the Canadian Wheat Board and was done with same-sex marriage in 2006.

It'll be a nice barnstorming tactic. Here's how I see it playing out:

Scene: Conservative Party rally in the 905 during the Writ Period.

Dramatis Personae: Stephen Harper, Local Conservative MP or Candidate

Text:

Stephen Harper: My friends today we are engaged in a struggle over the future of our great country. Two very different visions of our future are being presented to you in this election. The Ignatieff Liberals, and their former Coalition partners, the Bloc and NDP, have a very different vision from that of the Conservative Party. We believe that the right to private property is sacrosanct. By comparison, the opposition parties don't believe in this basic right for ordinary Canadians. 

In the last Parliament, my friend Scott Reid, presented a motion in the House of Commons to protect the property rights of Canadians. Because we lacked a majority this motion was defeated by the three opposition parties. This simple motion would have, in conjunction with a similar motion in the Ontario Legislature, amended our constitution to protect the property rights of ordinary Canadians. While the motion would only have applied to residents of Ontario, it would have established a powerful precedent that would likely have lead to similar motions for the other provinces.

Property rights were excluded from the Charter by the Liberal government of the time. A Conservative government will use its majority to enshrine property rights in our Constitution. The opposition parties tried to defend their position by saying that a right to private property would only help big business. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

A constitutional right to private property would help protect farmers, homeowners and small businesses from having their hard earned property taken away from them by busy body bureaucrats and ambitious politicians. It will help reward and protect those who drive our economy forward, while blocking the creation of white elephants that waste taxpayer money.

The right of ordinary Canadians to own property, while respecting the rights of others, has been essential to the success of Canada. Over the last few decades, as governments have grown bigger and more intrusive in our personal lives, the traditional common law right to property has been chipped away. Enshrining property rights in our constitution would help restore the balance between citizen and government. A Conservative majority government will restore that balance.

Thank you and God Bless Canada.

If anyone in the PMO happens to read this, you're more than free to steal it. What are the chances of that happening? About the same as Jack Layton acquiring a sense of modesty. The Harper Conservatives have made it clear they place power above principle. Short-term compromise above long-term preservation of our nation's traditional freedoms. That doesn't meant Messieurs Reid and Hillier's efforts are in vain. Motions like this place the issue of property rights on the political radar. It's a small but important early step in the fight to preserve and expand the freedom of Canadians.

 

Dief and the Technocrats

Hugh Segal (of all people):

Diefenbaker to take the party forward, it stepped firmly outside the Toronto circle to embrace a populist who had tried to win the leadership before and who had been rebuffed many times in Saskatchewan before winning Prince Albert in 1940. And Mr. Diefenbaker would take on the leadership at a time when the Liberals, in a post-war economic and victorious blush, seemed simply undefeatable, when the central government-business partnerships made large industry and government each others’ primary clients and key de facto shareholders. In essence, the war effort had fused corporate and private into one massive government industry consortium, as wars often do. This was not “nation and enterprise.” This was nation and enterprise as each other’s “subsidiary,” with no serious accountabilities for either.

Dief was not a conservative in the modern sense. Certainly a civil libertarian, his economic policies were, however, statist populism. He didn't much object to Big Government, just to Big Government stepping on the little guy. That by its nature a Leviathan state must step on the little guy never occurred to him. Like his political contemporaries, he believed that government was a tool to improve human life.

As Senator Segal points out, the Canada of the 1950s was a very cozy place, if you were a corporate or bureaucratic insider in the Ottawa-Montreal-Toronto Triangle. This technocratic oligarchy had guided the nation from the depths of the Depression, though Victory and into a seemingly unending post-war boom. Under their watch the idea of Full Employment was elevated into a sacrosanct principle. The High Priest of this ruling caste was C.D. Howe, an American-born engineer and businessman turned Liberal powerbroker. 

Howe and Dief were natural enemies. Not because either man were instinctive free marketers, but because they believed government should be managed to different ends. Howe's attitude was of a master builder, guiding a nation toward prosperity. Something akin to a French-style dirigisme. Dief's Main Street conservatism viewed such concentration of power as a threat to democracy. While industrial policy was largely dropped from the agenda during his premiership, the welfare state expanded at a fair clip. Pensions not pipelines became the new priority. 

While Dief brought many laudable beliefs to public office - especially his notion of One Canada - his political vision is akin to that of George W Bush's Compassionate Conservatism. There is, however, no such thing as government compassion, as compassion is a voluntary act between individuals and families, not a series of bureaucratic spending priorities. Howe, for all his managerial talents, would never have understood that. I think, looking back, Dief would have.

 

Tommy Douglas: Not Red Enough

But plenty pink:

Douglas also advocated anyone who wanted to marry be subject to government testing to obtain certificates of mental and physical fitness. He saw this as a way to keep “subnormal” humans from marrying.

"Because this class tend to intermarry... the second and third generations are nearly always worse than the first. The result is an ever increasing number of morons and imbeciles who continue to be a charge upon society,” Douglas wrote in defence of eugenics.

In the 1968 election, Douglas stated during the leaders debate he agreed with decriminalizing homosexuality. But he added "…we ought to recognize it for what it is: it's a mental illness, it's a psychiatric condition, which ought to be treated sympathetically by psychiatrists and social workers.”

But it was his long ties to left-wing groups that fascinated the RCMP, which seemed determined to prove Douglas was a Communist.

Yet Douglas accomplished far more - in terms of undermining Canadian liberty - by being a democratic socialist than he ever would have being a Communist mole. It's not the hidden threat, it's the danger hidden in plain sight. The major reason Canada is more statist - for the time being - than the United States is because of Medicare.

But Tommy Douglas is the Greatest Canadian. Pierre Berton once observed that you could get away with saying anything in Canada, so long as you wore a bow-tie. Tommy Douglas was not fond of bow-ties, unlike Lester Pearson and Pierre Berton, but he understood that folksy mannerism, and vague rhetoric about "the people," can carrying you a long way with an unsuspecting electorate.