A Kinist Perspective on Canada, Part I: Putting the Lie to ‘The True North Strong and Free’

Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.

~ Northrop Frye, Letters in Canada

Whenever a Canadian event makes international headlines, that fact in and of itself is newsworthy. Such an occurrence took place at the beginning of May, as a gargantuan wildfire threatened to decimate Fort McMurray, Alberta, the epicenter of the country’s world-renowned oil sands production.

With nearly 525,000 hectares ablaze and the entire city of 61,000 evacuated, along with another 40,000 workers in camps to the north, and with more than 20% of the residences therein destroyed, extensive news coverage was certainly warranted. Multiple facets of the story provided enormous reporting possibilities.

So it is especially telling (and galling) that less than a week after the fire initially started, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation decided that the following story, above all others, was what the public needed to know:

Syrian refugees evacuated from Fort McMurray

Fleeing a massive wildfire can feel a lot like fleeing war.

“Like when the missiles come down and burned the whole neighbourhood,” says Fort McMurray evacuee Abdul Almouazan, 66, through a translator.

Two years ago, Almouazan fled war-torn Syria with his family of eight. In February, they began their new life in Fort McMurray. Almouazan felt safe, “like a human being again.” . . .

But that changed Tuesday when, they escaped the smoke thickening around their beloved Timberlea home, heading to the local mosque.

Then the municipality issued a mandatory evacuation order. Suddenly, Almouazan and his family were on the run again.

It felt eerily familiar, he says, recalling moving from one shelter to the next in Syria. But rather than “missiles hunting them,” the wildfire’s embers rained down on them instead.¹

Canada, you see, has been in the vanguard of resettling covert ISIS sleeper cells – oh, sorry, I meant to say ‘Syrian refugees’ – within her own borders, part of a long-running and ham-fisted scheme to divest her native sons of their inheritance so that a new ethno-mosaic might emerge. This campaign of media-friendly genocide must be promoted at every opportunity – as Lenin taught us, the revolution doesn’t take catnaps ever. You had some time on the front pages, yeomanry! Time to give somebody else a chance! Don’t be greedy!

And lest the plebes didn’t get it the first time, the CBC followed up with an even more galling story:

Syrian refugees in Edmonton step up to help Fort McMurray fire evacuees

Morhaf Aldiri, who arrived in Edmonton in February, said Albertans have been so kind to him that he simply had to do something to give back.

“When I came it was very difficult,” said Aldiri. “Another country, I don’t know anything, any people, but lots of people help and help me, so it’s very nice.”

Alidiri, 25, knows what it’s like to lose everything.

He and his family had to run for their lives when their house was hit by a bomb in their home city of Daraa, Syria, in 2013. . . .

There are about 20 other refugee families in Aldiri’s new neighbourhood in northwest Edmonton.

When he talked to them about how they could support people affected by the fires, they came up with the idea of raising money to pay for a special meal for evacuees.

Aldiri then went around Edmonton collecting donations from other Syrian families.

“All the Syrian refugees, they want to return the favour” after so many Canadians have helped them, said Aldiri.²

Wasn’t that ‘nice’? It hardly matters that the money ‘raised’ for this most Christian of endeavours came from the federal government itself – it’s the thought that counts, right? And if you learn nothing else about Canada, please know that the old cliche is true: ‘nice’ truly does reign supreme up here. You would be hard-pressed to find so much as a peep of unease about this situation from any but the smallest possible handful of online reactionaries. Rest assured, though, that the country’s home-grown CIA clone CSIS is keeping close tabs on them.

As if one international headline wasn’t enough of a historical milestone, before the month was out, Canada once again found itself the darling of online chatterers everywhere, this time over the so-called ‘Elbowgate’ affair. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in a lather to get a vote underway on his Liberal party’s heinous assisted suicide bill, left his seat on the government bench to accost the opposition Conservative party’s whip (itself a big no-no according to parliamentary procedure). He proceeded to grab the whip’s arm and attempted to duckwalk him over to the opposition bench. When this predictably proved futile, he elbowed a female opposition member of parliament in the chest, snarled, ‘Get the **** out of my way’, and stormed off in a fit of pique. All of this was caught by the House of Commons television cameras for the world’s edification and amusement:

 

In his thus-far short tenure as PM, Trudeau has yearned to be seen in the eyes of the world as the epitome of what Canadian band Rush poetically termed the ‘New World Man’. This petty and petulant incident will stick to him like ice rime to a hockey puck and will go a long way in relieving him of that moniker. Such twelfth-rate tyranny is nothing new in the Senior Dominion, though it is comparatively rare for such behaviour to be captured on film. He obviously lacks his father’s talent for disguising despotism under a guise of suavity, as will be demonstrated in part II of this series.

Canadians have been a long time engaged in the search for a national identity. Offhand, I can’t think of a better description of that identity than a combination of these two stories. A nation vast in geography, yet puny in fundamental purpose. A nation so desperate to be liked and respected by the non-white, non-Christian world, yet so contemptuous of those who have actually had the temerity to live here for more than a few winters. A nation of structural order and of spiritual chaos. In short, no nation at all except on the UN roster.

And, unlike the rest of the Western world, this is no aberration that began a mere fifty, seventy-five years ago, either. No, this ‘country’ was founded as a holding pen for slaves, and it will remain so until its long-overdue breakup, God willing and may He be so, Amen. Let us review Canada’s history of soft-spoken iniquity.

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A nation’s history is largely determined by its geography, and this applies to Canada more so than others. Covering an area of nearly four million square miles and extending from the Pacific to the Atlantic and up to the Arctic, the vast majority of Canada consists of impenetrable areas of boreal forest, mountains, tundra, and plain old bare rock. It is an area rich in resources, but so vast and harsh that extracting them has, until very recently, proven exceptionally uneconomical. The country’s few areas of fertility – Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, the St. Lawrence river valley of Quebec, the Erie/Ontario bottomlands, the semi-arid grain-growing Palliser’s Triangle of the prairies, Alberta’s Peace River delta, and British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley being the primary agricultural zones – are separated from each other by a myriad of ocean tide, forest, marsh, mountain, and, most daunting of all, the massive zone of non-permeable bedrock known as the Canadian Shield, which encircles the entire central region of the country and serves as the drainage basin for the Great Lakes, its southern extremity. A coast-to-coast trek across this tangle would be akin to trying to cross the Mississippi using a series of stepping stones that are just a little bit out of jumping range – except for one section in the middle definitely out of jumping range where you’ll have to swim for it…and you can’t swim.

Such a Gordian knot of typography, away as it was from the fat of the land besides, ensured that little but the most subsistence agriculture and mining took place in Canada after the first seven hundred years or so following its initial discovery by Vikings. The region’s primary industry was trapping, and whosoever could establish the strongest presence there would also have default control over all the territory to the north. This lot initially fell France’s way, resulting in the patois of North American fur-trading in general being distinctively Gallic-themed (the voyageur, the coureur de bois, the portage, the rendez-vous). There was no keeping John Bull away from anything lucrative in these years, though, and by the mid-1600s the British were also major trappers in the region – and by the establishment of the royal charter of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670, granting exclusive rights to all trapping done in central Canada, increasingly the only trappers in the region. French trappers extended their trade further west and south, or gave up altogether and took up farming in Quebec, but it was clear that the British were in the ascendancy in North America.

Canada’s political history could be said to have begun in earnest in 1759, when, as part of the Seven Years’ War, the British general James Wolfe defeated the French general Marquis de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, outside of Quebec City. Though a relatively minor skirmish in the grand scheme of that war, it did prove to be the decisive end of French hegemony in North America and secured Canada as a British possession for one and all times. Four years later, a royal proclamation from George III consolidated these gains – which also included all territory east of the Mississippi river – officially. The remaining French population was thus absorbed into the British Empire. To restrain them from burning down various trading posts in protest, as is their wont, the Quebec Act of 1774 guaranteed the denizens of that region their Catholicism and their courts of civil, rather than common, law. Peace of a sort reigned. Alongside its original American thirteen colonies and its fledgling colony in India, the new northern acquisition ensured Britain that she was well on her way to Empire.

As can be imagined, the existence of a vast British territory to their north did nothing to quell the simmering unrest burbling in the American colonies, and the consolidation of this area played its role in fomenting the American Revolution. After a botched raid on Quebec by American forces in 1775, Canada’s military role in the Revolution ceased. However, a crucial development in the nation’s makeup would ensue as hostilities drew to a close. Retaining their fidelity to the Crown, tens of thousands of United Empire Loyalists would leave the newly formed United States of America for safer havens in Nova Scotia and the area now encompassing southern Ontario, bypassing the already-settled Quebec region. This would lead to the creation of two entirely new provinces – Upper Canada in Ontario and Lower Canada in Quebec – to accommodate the bicultural makeup of British North America (the territory east of the Mississippi having been ceded to the U.S. in the 1783 Treaty of Paris).

Later generations of eastern Canadians would take great pride in being the progeny of this first major wave of British settlement to their country. One such descendant would write reverently of them:

The Loyalists, to a considerable extent, were the very cream of the population of the Thirteen Colonies. They represented in very large measure the learning, the piety, the gentle birth, the wealth and good citizenship of the British race in America, as well its devotion to law and order, British institutions, and the unity of the Empire. This was the leaven they brought to Canada, which has leavened the entire Dominion of this day.³

Noble sentiments indeed, and ones with a good deal of truth to them as well. However, just as the good leaven of the New Testament does not coincide with the sinful leaven of the Old, so too was the Tory exodus northward not an unqualified triumph. Indeed, many of the traits these sons of Britain brought with them wrought the seeds of their descendants’ eventual destruction.

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This seems as good a spot as any to introduce the reader to the Canadian mindset, as this first major British emigration established many of the tropes that would be prevalent up until the present day.

It can be very, very difficult to explain to an outsider precisely how a typical Canadian’s thought processes operate. It is a subject that I personally have considered for the better part of my life. If I had to pick a phrase that summed up the Canadian social ideal, it would be ‘nice authoritarianism’. Imagine 1984’s Big Brother issuing doublespeak in a gently folksy Gordon Lightfoot voice and I wouldn’t say you nay. Further, if I had to pick a phrase that summed up the resulting attitude among Canadians it would be ‘non-confrontational narcissism’. A combination of these two traits results in a smug indifference to governmental tyranny that borders on pride in being a member of an arctic anthill. As an example, if one were to lambast this country’s exorbitant breadth of nickel-and-dime taxation, stifling regulatory measures in all aspects of home and small business life, and grotesquely inflated cost of living in comparison with the neighbour not too far to the south, it would not be unusual to hear as a response, ‘Well, that’s only the price we have to pay for living in the greatest country on the planet!! What, do you want to be an AMERICAN or something???’

No, I don’t. But I don’t look at getting badly screwed as a virtue, either. God frowns on martyr complexes.

Canadian patriotic fervour does not follow the jingoistic aggressiveness of the Toby Keith crowd so odious to the rest of the world (including Confederate and Western Americans), but for all that it is no less obnoxious due to its false humility. It can best be summarized as the self-satisfaction gleaned from the ‘fact’ that as long as you sew a little Canadian flag on your backpack, you can go off hiking in Kandahar province with your fellow sociology grads from Laval University and expect coos of ‘Awww!’ and friendly hugs from the residents during every leg of your journey. Canadians have long taken pride in being ‘liked’ by the rest of the world. Never mind that this feeling goes no deeper than a nine-year-old girl’s infatuation with Justin Bieber – better to be condescendingly tolerated than genuinely respected. You can score a lot more pot that way.

I find this attitude maddening and, as the years have passed, increasingly deadening. And the impetus began with the Loyalist onslaught. They came north with a decidedly self-righteous demeanour, and British authorities did everything they could to ensure that this demeanour remained, as it ultimately enabled them to consolidate their power with minimal fuss. As one academic put it:

The persons who left the old colonies because they would not relinquish their allegiance, seem from the first, to have had a firm consciousness of their own virtue, and attitude. The response to this of the Imperial government was an attitude which evinced quite extra-ordinary generosity. The Loyalists were fed and clothed until they could get their lands into production, and provision was made not only for liberal land grants but even more important, for clearing away all the brushwood that surrounded the grant of good titles. Given the resources of the 18^th century, and transatlantic distances, it was no small task to put thirty thousand people on new landholdings, feed them, clothe them, and keep them alive with some of them a thousand miles from the sea and nothing but river transport in between. . . .

Lord Dorchester, now Governor-in-Chief of British North America, proposed “to put a Mark of Honour upon the families who had adhered to the unity of the empire, and joined the Royal Standard in America before the Treaty of Separation in the year 1783, and all their children and descendants by either sex.” The persons concerned were “to be distinguished by the letters U.E affixed to their names, alluding to their great principle the Unity of the Empire.” In this way, the United Empire Loyalists, as distinguished from mere Loyalists, came into being. The letters have always been cherished, and for nearly a century now the privilege of using them has been buttressed by the various Associations which collectively make up The United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada.⁴

A rather stunning example of paternalism, that. One can only imagine how differently the history of the world would have borne out had the Crown taken similar steps to aid and abet the dissenters who landed in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, or the criminals who landed on the east coast of Australia. One also doesn’t have to have a Ph.D in political science to discern that these newly landed gentry with their newly adopted titles very soon found themselves in positions of governance with a very valuable lesson under their belts: it pays to be the good and obedient son rather than the naughty and rebellious son.

Another very valuable lesson was also quickly grasped: Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore. The geographical scope of the new homeland, the harsh climate, the shockingly short growing season, and the dense canopy of virgin forest all combined to present a thoroughly overwhelming experience. Weather conditions were considerably more brutal than they were down south: hurricane-force gales hammered the Canadian Maritimes far more frequently than they did the U.S. Atlantic coast, lake effect precipitation in southern Ontario ensured that snowfalls measured in feet were the rule rather than the exception, continental climates further inland where extremes in all weather patterns prevailed and could last for years – all these would test the stoutest of hearts, and it is little wonder that they resulted in the Loyalists’ relying even more on the established authorities who, if nothing else, knew what to expect when winter rolled around. The English peoples have long been fascinated with geography – witness the matter-of-fact dropping of a myriad of small town names, glades, fens, etc. in any Victorian pastoral novel or any BBC program. This proclivity would carry on in British North America, with its citizens awestruck at the beautiful yet terrifying vistas laid out before them, right up to the present time. Even more so than in other nations, Canadian patriotism tends to put geography first and foremost. Mention the fact that a secession movement exists in Alberta and an Ontario resident is very likely to respond, ‘Oh, no! We can’t break up the country!! I love Canada!!! We’ve been out to Banff plenty of times, and it’s beautiful!!!’ Imagine a South Carolinian vowing to stay with the Union so that he could more easily visit Cape Cod in the fall and this argument is shown to be thoroughly facile.

Canada’s resultant political systems would come as close to an ideal Hobbesian Leviathan state as the world has ever witnessed – a reaction against the nasty and brutish environment in which such seeds took root, where the summers were noticeably short. Compare these words of Hobbes on the citizen’s proper role in the state:

When a man hath . . . granted away his Right [to quite literally everything – CM]; then is he said to be OBLIGED, or BOUND, not to hinder those, to whom such Right is granted, or abandoned, from the benefit of it: and that he Ought and it is his DUTY, not to make voyd that voluntary act of his own.⁵

With these famous words from W. L. Morton, describing the mission of Canada as set forth in the 1867 constitution:

Not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but peace, order, and good government are what the national government of Canada guarantees.⁶

And the obvious origin of the latter in the words of the former is quite chilling. Canadians have long harboured a hysterical phobia towards mere ‘anarchy’ – that word being a catch-all for any condition that threatens to undermine the gigantic straw-man cocoon in which Canadians feel the need to spend their lives. Is the government threatening to cut proposed increases in health care spending? Anarchy! Did the lights flicker during a blizzard? Anarchy!! Are rumours afloat that the Toronto Maple Leafs are relocating to Houston? Anarchy, anarchy, anarchy!!!!!!

Thank goodness the perfidious French were on hand for British derision, or Canada would have been the nervous breakdown capital of the world right from its inception. For over two hundred years, the primary spice of life provided in the northern hinterlands has been the traditional bitter rivalry between these two peoples. Issues of contention are legion. Protestant/Catholic animosities are perhaps the best known – barring a swarm of Irish after the famine and an influx of papist Scottish Highlanders into Cape Breton in the early nineteenth century, Canada’s Catholic population was exclusively francophone, while anglophones held fast to that most British of Protestant denominations, Anglicanism – and went back to before the Seven Years’ War, with the British deportation of thousands of French Acadians from the Maritimes to the Thirteen Colonies fostering resentments among francophones that took generations to abate. Other grievances abounded: the seigneurial system of land distribution in Quebec, with parcels of land allotted along river banks in long rectangular strips, left little choice land for Anglo settlers in the region. Subservient status in a newly-powerful Anglo Empire naturally sat ill with most Frenchmen. The proclivity of the French to intermix with the native Indian population (more on that in part II) scandalized the British who, true to the best of their form, tended to stay among their own kind. Perhaps the single largest source of discord, though, is fundamental differences in temperament – the staid, sturdy Albion alongside the restive, fire-breathing Gaul? It just won’t do. One can hardly imagine Burke and Robespierre sharing an apartment, after all. It also begs the question: given how unworkable a ‘bi’cultural system proved to be, how on earth would later generations expect a ‘multi’cultural system to function any sweeter? Still and all, throughout history the French have proven to have been far more successful at gaining their own ends within Canada than the English have. Their means have been simple and ruthless: as Quebec nationalist Leon Dion put it, French Canada had to hold ‘a knife to the throat’ of English Canada to obtain perks. Such methods work. In order to deter latent separatism in la belle province, a disproportionate number of Canadian prime ministers in the latter half of the twentieth century onward have hailed from Quebec, and a certain proportion of cabinet positions are required to be filled by Quebeckers. This federal situation has naturally resulted in a great deal of pork monies finding their way into Montreal bank accounts. Perhaps some day English Canadians will realize similar tactics. Hah! Who am I kidding?

Divided as they were on most issues, though, they could come together in agreement on a virulent anti-Americanism. It should be noted, though, that this doesn’t necessarily translate into hatred for what we would today call ‘Murikan’ values, such as global hegemony – their respective homelands were both vigorously engaged in empire-building, so who were they to bewail such a state? The contempt pervaded far deeper than that, to the point that anything even remotely connected to the popular conception of the United States was rejected out of hand in a half-baked attempt for the new society to establish its own distinctive identity. Thus, self-sustenance was jeered at while ‘the greater good’ was applauded. Only the police and the military should own firearms, so that ‘order’ can reign supreme. Eventually, of course, this would translate into a repudiation of ‘racism’ in favour of an insane open-door multicultural policy, and a rejection of Christianity altogether for a pluralism that encompassed everything from Gaia worship to Indian mysticism to the lamest personality cults imaginable. But all of that still lay in the future.

The closest Canadians would ever come to embracing anything even remotely American was in their petitioning for ‘responsible’ government. In typically watered-down Canuck fashion, what they meant by this was a country where the Crown’s resident governor-general could not override the decisions of the Canadian Parliament in matters relating to internal governance. This was what passed for radical Jacobinism in these environs. It also led to one of only two major uprisings ever to occur in Canada – a simultaneous uprising from Louis-Joseph Papineau in Quebec and from William Lyon Mackenzie in Ontario against each province’s respective mercantile overlords – the Chateau Clique and the Family Compact – in 1837. (The other rebellion, Louis Riel’s 1871 revolt, will be dealt with in the next section.) Both rebellious factions were put down (welcome to Canada), but the resulting furor resulted in the creation of the first unified province of Canada via the Act of Union of 1840, making the much-vaunted ‘responsible government’ a reality – and satisfying absolutely no one. The matter-of-fact tone adopted by the Canadian Encyclopedia regarding the Act and its aftermath speaks volumes about the Canadian character:

The Act’s main provisions were the establishment of a single parliament with equal representation from each constituent section – now called Canada East and Canada West; consolidation of debt; a permanent Civil List (the list of officials on the government payroll); banishment of the French language from official government use; and suspension of specific French Canadian institutions relating to education and civil law. The Act naturally aroused considerable opposition. In Upper Canada, the Family Compact opposed union, and in Lower Canada religious and political leaders reacted against its anti-French measures.

In fact, the Act was unfair to Lower Canada with its larger population and smaller debt. However, both Canadas agreed to work within the Act, especially under the liberal influence of the united Reform Party led by Louis Lafontaine from Canada East and Robert Baldwin from Canada West.

Within 15 years many unjust clauses were repealed. Economic prosperity brought wealth and growth to the united colony, and responsible government arrived — modifying many of the Act’s financial and constitutional provisions.⁷

Hardly in the same category as the drama surrounding the signing of the Magna Carta, but at least everybody was polite in their misery, and that’s the important thing. Meek as it was, though, this episode also started another distinctively Canadian trend – following in the footsteps of American political developments years after the fact. And by ‘following’, I mean like a little kid trying to leapfrog into his dad’s footprints in snow four feet deep.

This little act, of course, was merely the backdrop for the inevitable: the Confederation of Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into the glorious Dominion of Canada in 1867. The Act of Union had ground the government to a screeching halt. (Little wonder on the resulting economic prosperity, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia!) To prevent this catastrophic situation from continuing, the control freaks John A. Macdonald, George-Étienne Cartier, and George Brown set out to consolidate the holdings of British North America into one lumpen mass. How they ‘convinced’ the Atlantic provinces to go along with their scheme is especially galling, and is presented here in yet another matter-of-fact tone:

In the meantime, the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island had been discussing the idea of a union among themselves. The first Charlottetown Conference in September 1864 was originally planned as a meeting to debate this idea of Maritime union. Macdonald, Cartier and Brown invited themselves [!!!!] to the conference to try to sell their idea of a larger union of all the British North American colonies. For seven days they took control of the agenda and made their persuasive arguments.⁸

Macdonald would go on to become Canada’s first prime minister (‘Conservative’, natch), Cartier a federal Conservative member of parliament and a member of the provincial Quebec assembly simultaneously, and George Brown the Liberal Party’s first (unelected to parliament) leader, so you can well imagine what such heavy-handedness portended for the future state. To their credit, the Atlantic provinces, by and large, put up a stalwart resistance to taking part in the scheme – with their drastically smaller populations, limited land areas, and specialized fishing/shipping economies, how could they do otherwise? Prince Edward Island, the smallest Canadian province, would gallantly hold out from joining the confederation until 1873. In large part, the anti-confederation forces revolved around the efforts of Nova Scotia premier and staunch Anglophile Joseph Howe who, staunchly opposed to any union with Frenchmen, thundered, “Will you, my countrymen, the descendants of these men, warmed by their blood, inheriting their language, and having the principles for which they struggled confided to your care, allow them to be violated in your hands?”⁹ Sadly, the answer was ‘yes’. Having failed in his quest for provincial independence, Howe turned into a complete toad, serving in Macdonald’s cabinet in 1869 and playing a large role in bringing the newly-formed western province of Manitoba into the unholy union the following year. Such is the Canadian vortex that drives out all aspects of verve and zeal.

The confederation’s new constitution was a bloodless, sycophantic affair that officially proclaimed that Canada was the home of ‘peace, order, and good government’ and that the entirety of the British Westminster parliamentary system of government was sufficient as a model for Ottawa and the provinces. Thus, the largest, and perhaps the most servile, colony in the history of the world came into being. Pride in one’s British heritage and preservation of her ways is one thing – the American founders were influenced by exactly that – but Canada seemed content in playing the role of Resource Mine to the Empire, justifying the resulting lack of prosperity with a gently complacent shrug that doing one’s ‘duty’ was a hard row to hoe indeed. All subsequent concessions of independence originated from the mother country, and they were slow in coming. Canada moved from colony status to full dominion status only in 1931 with the Statute of Westminster, laying the foundation for the future British Commonwealth…and unlike all other participants, Canada refused to ratify the statute until a federal legislative majority authorized it. British declarations of war ceased to be automatically applicable to Canada only in 1947, with the issuance of the Letters Patent from George VI granting the governors-general in the dominions more discretionary powers. Full independence from Britain, amazingly enough, did not occur until 1982, when the magnanimous parliament of Britain passed the Canada Act, granting the by-then 115 year old country the right to amend its own constitution. The Trudeau government of the day responded by concocting the aberrant Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a laughable parody of the American Bill of Rights that has codified Canada’s covert Marcusian cultural Marxism into the overt law of the land – thus making ‘discrimination’ based on race, religion, sex, age, physical handicap, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc., etc. in all aspects of life felonies.¹⁰ Bojidar Marinov himself couldn’t have drafted a more insidious document.

Federal-provincial relations could best be described with the well-known (if sanitized) phrase ‘offal runs downhill’. If Ottawa had to suffer the diktats of a far-off government then, by Jove, the provinces were going to do the same from far-off Ottawa, and they were going to like it! The provinces saw fit to act likewise towards the municipalities, and a depressing time of it was had by all. The society springing forth from such a distinctively British tyranny, combined with a savage continental sub-Arctic climate, was not one noted for its joy in life. Anthony Trollope, making a tour of North America shortly after Confederation, would note that in crossing the U.S.-Canada border “one moved from a richer country into one that was poorer, from a greater country into one that was less.”¹¹ An Irish visitor to Canada during the same era would offer an even more insightful observation: “There is no galvanizing a corpse! Canada is dead – dead church, dead commerce, dead people. A poor, priest-ridden, politician-ridden, doctor-ridden, lawyer-ridden land. No energy, no enterprise, no snap.”¹² Native Britons looked at Canada as a colonial backwater, scarcely worth the expense of upkeep, and a land fit only for the most grasping and inept of England’s native bureaucrats and the most incorrigible of her gentry’s second and third sons. British humorist George Rose would say with acerbity: “One doesn’t know what can induce a man to accept the post of (Canadian) Governor-General unless he should be a misanthrope or have hosts of relations at home whom he is anxious to make distant.”¹³ A triumvirate of cities – Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal – would serve as the latter day Chateau Clique/Family Compact, surrounded by miles upon miles upon miles of poorly roaded wilderness, some of it farmland but most of it timber and rock. Cities outside of this Axis of Banal Evil floundered. Halifax, which in pre-Confederation days was one of the world’s leading shipbuilding centers, post-Confederation would begin a long slow decay into the pogey-ridden debt-hemorrhaging seasonal fishery it is today. Joseph Howe knew whereof he spake.

And yet, for all its lethargy, one shouldn’t discount the resourcefulness of the country’s British yeomanry – left largely to their own devices, they didn’t have much of a choice. Canada would become a genuine agrarian powerhouse, with its farmer-scientists developing or perfecting new varieties of truck and grains developed to prosper within the country’s abbreviated growing season – from the McIntosh apple to the strain of Red Fife wheat – that would rank the nation among the world’s most remarkable breadbaskets, given its latitude, and would also garner the (now sadly deteriorated) Canadian National Exhibition, a well-deserved reputation as one of the world’s top agricultural fairs. The country’s Anglo-Celtic and Germanic-Nordic fishermen, lumbermen, miners, and oil drillers would likewise play pivotal roles in sustaining a country so rich in minerals and yet so poor in Christian purpose.

Much of Canada’s agrarianism would be situated in the western prairies and the fertile southern valleys in the mountains of the far west, necessitating westward expansion and, thus, a railroad. Such were the terms the future province of British Columbia would demand in order to be persuaded to enter the union. Only one little problem: that whole geography thing. Turns out constructing a railway across the vast Canadian Shield alone, never mind the mountain ranges farther west, would be prohibitively costly, and couldn’t exactly be settled en route in order to garner profit. Ottawa, in its wisdom, never stopped to consider that the standard route from the east to the Red River agricultural colony in Manitoba lay to the south of the Great Lakes for a reason. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald would solve this dilemma by awarding an open-ended cost-plus contract to Hugh Allan’s Canadian Pacific Railroad syndicate, granting the company excessively generous land grants out west that would keep farmers in that region enslaved to a subsidized octopus for generations. Never mind also that Allan’s syndicate contained a good deal of hidden American money within its coffers, despite the fact that the venture was sold as being ‘all-Canadian’, and never mind also that a good deal of this money was rumoured to have wound up in Macdonald’s pocket, prompting Canada’s first great political scandal and its first change in government when the ruling Conservatives were ousted in favour of Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals in 1873. Thus, a land mass decreed by God to remain separate nations by His creation was unified into a British protectorate thanks to sleazy Yankee influence and far more money than the entire venture was worth. A perfect Canadian metaphor, yet one that the country’s hack popular historians like Pierre Berton have lauded as one of the world’s ‘great accomplishments’. Engineering-wise? Could be. Nation-building-wise? Pfft.

Canada’s frontier mythology differed radically from that of the U.S. as well, needless to say. No anarchic gunfights, range wars, lynchings, rowdy saloon shenanigans, and renegade lawmen like the Earps up here! No, instead we had the federally centralized North-West Mounted Police, the precursors to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whose mandate (according to legend) stretched the gamut from keeping American whisky traders from selling firewater to our noble-at-heart redskinned brethren, confiscating firearms at the border, and collecting duties at the Alaskan border during the Klondike gold rush. Give the RCMP credit for one thing: their worldwide public relations and marketing are superb. This has been a veneer they have always been anxious to keep up. Hence, when four Mounties stupidly got themselves shot when skulking about the property of a notoriously dangerous man in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, in 2005, they were idolized as the paragons of law and order, feted in everything from song to statuary, and their day of death all but declared an official day of mourning. Kiss your shackles, thou Bukharinite!

What of Canada’s figureheads of authority, her prime ministers and high-ranking politicians? Non-entities on the world stage and, until the 1960s, purveyors of the school of thought that stolidness and an outside coat of piety conveyed a ‘fundamentally sound’ hand at the helm. Had they attended the Congress of Vienna, they would have been making a fuss because the ashtrays were overflowing. This isn’t much of an exaggeration, as the demeanour of the Canadian delegation at the Versailles Treaty Conference of 1919, led by PM Robert Borden, suggests:

If the British were the masters and the matrons, the Canadians were the senior prefects, a little bit serious perhaps, but reliable. . . . They took a high moral tone (not for the first time in international relations), saying repeatedly that they wanted nothing for themselves. But with food to sell and a hungry Europe at hand, the Canadian minister of trade managed to get agreements with France, Belgium, Greece, and Rumania.¹⁴

William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, could also serve as a prototypical example of the breed. Personality-wise, he was a colorless fussbucket, lifelong bachelor, dabbler in the occult (he conducted regular seances to attain political advice from his dead hero, former francophone PM Wilfred Laurier), second-string hobnobber with world leaders (including Hitler in 1937), and lifelong friend of the Rockefellers (he served as John D. Rockefeller Jr’s counsel for the Ludlow Massacre trial). King would win election after election between 1919 and 1948 (uninterrupted save for a five year hiatus from 1930-35) through simpering to Britain for just a bit more authority, like Oliver Twist asking for more porridge, while simultaneously currying ever more favour with the U.S. – finding a soulmate in fellow despot FDR, he would attempt to ape both his New Deal and WWII policies on a tenth of the budget, with predictably underwhelming results. Also in keeping with future trends, his biographers after his death would desperately attempt to prove he was a racist, the many examples of hemming and hawing on the subject of race and his avowed philosemitism in his copious diaries to the contrary.¹⁵

As for provincial-level politicians, they have been largely content to beg for their livelihood from the centralized coffers of Ottawa rather than to seize upon what is rightfully theirs. The Canadian consensus has long been that Canada’s best recent premier has been Peter Lougheed, who governed Alberta from 1971 to 1985. His reputation largely rests on his standing fast on retaining Alberta’s (and, by extension, the other provinces’) sovereignty over natural resources when Pierre Trudeau attempted to impose price controls on the Canadian oil industry via the National Energy Program – a position that garnered him respect even in the eastern provinces, the intended beneficiaries of the program. The reality is that a good deal of this ‘stand’ was mere posturing, cynically designed to vault his Progressive Conservative party¹⁶ back into power in the Alberta general election of 1982. One columnist described this phony pose thus:

There is one image of Lougheed that is forever seared in my memory and that will forever colour my recollection of him and his legacy. It’s a photograph taken in 1981 of the Alberta leader clinking champagne glasses with then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau to toast a federal-provincial energy deal that I and many other Albertans viewed as a capitulation to Trudeau’s disastrous National Energy Program.

Lougheed later admitted the toast was the worst political mistake of his life, but how could he not have seen that from the start? It was obvious to so many that Ottawa’s cash and power grab defied the constitution by invading provincial justification. Trudeau would never have done the same to Quebec or Ontario. Why, we wondered, would Lougheed give in without a protracted and messy fight?¹⁷

Why? Because Lougheed was the epitome of a Red Tory, that’s why – a doctrine of conservatism that originated in Britain as a dedication to the ‘common good’ from the gentry and nobility, under the tenets of noblesse oblige, but in its Canadian iteration morphed into an ideology where Big Brother reigns supreme, but promises his Winston Smiths to keep taxes at ‘reasonable’ levels. We can see the effectual workings of this philosophy also in Lougheed’s attempts to diversify the Alberta economy away from its dependence on oil and gas. An astute plan in and of itself, but the primary way he went about it was to go on a spending spree to ensure that every whistle-stop on the prairies had their very own state-of-the-art hospital and their very own brand-spanking new red brick provincial building for the disbursement of driver’s license examinations, environmental permits, and other such bedrocks of civilization. Had his governmental tenure not come to an end at the same time the world oil bust was beginning to stabilize from the shocks of the 70s and early 80s, his reputation in western Canada would be far less than it is now.

As the twentieth century dragged on, it became inevitable that, as Canada’s bastard parents Britain and the U.S. both drifted (at 90 mph) into socialism, Narnia of the North would be following suit. The primary catalyst behind the formation of Canada’s first avowedly socialist party was a social gospel Methodist minister and professional prig named James Shaver Woodsworth – a name as reverenced among Canuck secularists as Martin Luther King’s is to their American counterparts. Fawning admirer Pierre Berton described him in this fashion:

His personal credo could be summed up in his own words: “A curse still hangs over inactivity. A severe condemnation still rests upon indifference…Christianity stands for social righteousness as well as personal righteousness…We have tried to provide for the poor. Yet, have we tried to alter the social conditions that lead to poverty?” . . .

He had visited the Soviet Union and had hobnobbed with the British Fabians, but his own brand of socialism was distinctively Canadian. “I believe that we in Canada must work out our salvation in our own way,” he was to say. “I am convinced that we may develop in Canada a distinct type of socialism. I refuse to follow slavishly the British model or the American model or the Russian model. We in Canada will solve our problems along our own lines.” He was a Canadian through and through. [Certainly no argument here. – CM] In those days the census takers insisted that all should list their racial origins, no matter how many centuries their forbears might have spent in Canada. Woodsworth stubbornly refused.¹⁸

His was the guiding force that lead to the gloriously named Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation – a political party whose name suggested more an agricultural venture than anything – and little wonder, as it was especially designed to appeal to disaffected farmers in western Canada disgusted with the federal Conservative and Liberal parties. And in typically noble-hearted and thick-headed Canadian fashion, at the party’s founding convention a proviso was built into its constitution that ensured it would remain forever ineffectual:

The convention, pushed hard by the radicals, added one sentence to [the] original draft. “No CCF Government will rest content,” it read, “until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth.”

It was that final piece of rhetoric that M.J. Coldwell described as “a millstone” around the party’s neck. It suggested that the new federation was revolutionary rather than reformist in its goals – determined to abolish the capitalistic system, though not by the violence that the communists were said to advocate.¹⁹

Thus, the CCF would officially attempt to show those rather vulgar and roughshod Soviet Bolsheviks that they could ignore the fundamental depravity of human nature and codify Utopia into law through reasoned and pleasant debate in the House of Commons, not hesitating to give a stern word of admonition when it was called for, either! Or to put it another way: even in their evil rebellion against God, they thoroughly lacked the courage of their convictions. The CCF would take umbrage at the ‘harsh’ wording of the catechisms of the church of Laodicea.

Though they had limited success at the federal level, provincially the party fared considerably better, and in 1944 Canada had the distinction of electing the first socialist government in North America above the municipal level when the province of Saskatchewan elected a CCF government under the leadership of another ‘great’ Canadian treasure and another social gospel pastor: Thomas Clement “Tommy” Douglas.²⁰ Douglas is renowned as being the father of Canada’s unique flavor of socialized medicine, where a person never pays a cent up front for any kind of a hospital procedure, gets soaked later in the year and for the remainder of his life in taxes far, far above the cost of said procedure, and thanks his own personal deity that medical care is magically free north of the 49^th parallel. The process was initially created as a mere public insurance stop-gap to ensure that no one would be bankrupted through a disease or injury – a deductible was put in place – but the ‘free’ implications quickly overrode mere pecuniary considerations and by the end of his term in 1961 he had laid the framework for the enactment of compulsory universal health care (and stepped down from office in time to avoid a massive doctors’ strike waged in protest of this policy). Douglas would move on to Ottawa, becoming the leader of the federal CCF (newly rechristened under the more urbane-sounding and people’s republic-suggesting New Democratic Party) and would lobby the Liberal government of Lester Pearson to enact a national version of universal health coverage which would entirely usurp individual provincial plans (this despite the fact that health care is clearly established as a provincial responsibility under the Canadian constitution). This has led to the current state of mind among Canadians, who tremble at the thought that their ‘right’ to go in to see the doctor every time their nose runs or their flatulence becomes excessive might be severely curtailed by even the slightest trimming of the federal health budget, and might lead the way to the introduction of a dreaded ‘two-tier’ public/private health care system. It also ensures that the government can mandate every aspect of your life – what you can and cannot eat, drink, and smoke, what you must do to maximize your ‘safety’ (seat belts and bike helmets save millions of lives each year, after all), how much you must exercise, and, should the trend continue, how many children you are allowed to have, if any. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, the way to a slave’s heart is through his government goodie bag.

As a postscript, it is worth noting that the heavily socialistic strain of Canadian society allowed the Soviet Union to run a secure spy ring out of its Ottawa embassy – the first official such ring to be confirmed operating in North America (revealed after the defection to Canada of Igor Gouzenko in 1945), and one found to be working in close collaboration with the Jewish Marxist MP Fred Rose. Mackenzie King, still PM at the time, shut his eyes really tight and hoped the whole thing would go away so that a ‘scene’ would not occur on the international stage. O Canada.

**********

Thus far, my intent has been to demonstrate the incredible number of ways white Canadians have been coddled, coerced, badgered, and duped into the thoroughly pliable lump of clay they resemble today. Space limitations prevent me from listing further examples, but they are multitudinous. There was the Canadian Wheat Board, a government marketing board that acted until very recently as the only legal purchaser of the country’s enormous grain crops…that was only applicable to western Canada, and was not in force in the east. There was the federal gun registry of the 1990s, scrapped only because the cost of maintaining it had grown too onerous…tis a beast that will likely be back again. There was the War Measures Act, a WWI-era bill never scrapped which allowed the curtailment of habeas corpus in an ’emergency’, and which was invoked by Pierre Trudeau in 1970 in a ruthless ploy to crush separatist sentiment in Quebec for one and all times – using the decidedly false-flagged murder of Quebec labor minister Pierre Laporte by low-grade Marxist separatist ‘terrorists’ as an excuse. And so on and so forth.

All of this serves to prove Rushdoony’s words correct: ‘Tyranny, rule without God’s law, is inescapable where theonomy is set aside.’²¹ It hardly matters how ‘nice’ and ‘guileless’ such tyrants are. Indeed, he also addresses this point: ‘The tyrants are earnest men, from the days of the Tower of Babel to the present. They believe that they are alone capable of saving the world by means of their planned world order. ‘²² And the rulers of Canada have been nothing if not ‘earnest’.

All of this preparation was necessary in order to move on to the next step: the great multiculturalization of Canada and the destruction of whatever remnants of Christianity were left within her, so as to make Pat Buchanan’s ‘Soviet Empire of Canuckistan’ a reality and to ensure that no viable resistance movements to the one-world order could ever hope to take root in her oceans of acreage. Though this program got under way in earnest in the mid-1960s, vestiges of anti-racism could be seen throughout Canadian history that would help to foster the popular notion that Canada always was the true empire of egalitarianism that the U.S. could only pretend to be.

The story will be continued in part II.

We’re just getting started, kids.

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