Category / Current Discourse

by Kevin Richard

Fake News is Real; and it’s Dangerous!

Regardless of what one may think about President Trump, the fact remains that he’s right about one thing: Fake news is a real phenomenon. No doubt he plays this to his advantage in an effort to discredit what may very well be credible allegations against him, but sensationalist journalists keep proving him right. In the process of reporting fake news, not only do they unjustly discredit their many responsible counterparts, and not only do they undermine the value of their profession, but they also sow the seeds of dangerous social unrest.

Last Tuesday, TVA reported that representatives from two mosques in the Côte-des-Neiges district of Montreal, made a formal request to the construction company conducting roadwork on their street, asking them to bar women workers from the site during Friday prayers. The report portrays this as being more of an insistence than a request, claiming that women were chased away (chassées) from the site, and claiming that they had already been penalized by missing work.

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by Neil Cameron

Liberal Nationalism and Demographic Realism

Globe & Mail international affairs journalist Doug Saunders has just published a book intended to influence public policy, Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians is Not Enough (Knopf, 2017). Having already written a not entirely convincing refutation of the Europe-focused alarmism of writers like Mark Steyn about the impact of mass Muslim migration, Saunders this time concentrates on Canada, more on is its reception of new people of all backgrounds than about their composition. It presently looks fairly likely that Canada may slowly acquire several tens of millions of additional population over the coming century, just plugging along with roughly present immigration practices and domestic birth rates, but Saunders wants to see a more rapid and consistent growth policy, moving the country to 100 million as rapidly as possible. He offers empirical and theoretical arguments in support.

Most of the pros and cons of adapting such a course could be made in a few pages, but Saunders expands on the pros with two themes. The first is a selective history of the ‘failing’ quality of government policies from the 19th to the mid-20th century, nearly all years marked by large emigration, sometimes as substantial as the scale of new arrivals, with slow net domestic growth. The second is to portray even the more recent rapidly growing populations of the three or four largest Canadian cities as actually insufficient to provide the internal markets and domestic tax bases to maintain adequate services, thus making it very difficult, for example, for these cities to introduce much of the high-tech rapid public transport found in many large cities elsewhere.

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by Kevin Richard

A Governor General Must be Carefully Chosen

For a great many Canadians the office of Governor General is thought to be little more than a useless and wasteful ceremonial position. The long series of stable governments that Canada has enjoyed has certainly contributed to this belief, much like an expensive insurance policy from which we never make a claim. As a result, Prime Ministers have become somewhat careless in their task of nominating one. Instead of giving it the careful consideration it deserves, PM’s appear to have used it as a means to reward accomplishment and to curry favour from voters by choosing someone with general appeal.

In 2008, this approach proved to be a mistake. In December, a mere two months after a federal election, the Conservative minority government was facing a vote of confidence which would have likely done them in. A proposed coalition between the Liberals and the NDP, with the backing of the Bloc, was in the works. In an attempt to suspend the vote and save his government, Prime Minister Harper asked the Governor General of the time, Michaëlle Jean, to prorogue parliament until January.

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by Neil Cameron

War and Remembrance Over a Lifetime

Almost half a century ago, I was spending three years in England, studying the politics of the British scientific elite in the interwar and World War II years. The great events of those years still haunted the country as a whole, but the interest of historians had also newly spiked from 1970, as the government had just decided, rather than continuing the past procedure of opening official archives year by year, thirty years after the files had been created, to release almost all those of the Second World War at once. This also led to new availability of previously restricted private papers of important figures, and to a flood of new memoirs and scholarly monographs..

Coming from McGill, I found myself in a very different intellectual atmosphere. Montreal university campuses were overwhelmingly preoccupied locally with the rise of Quebec political nationalism, internationally with the long Vietnam War. These concerns, combined with the huge expansion of student numbers as successive waves of baby boomers arrived, had been having great impact on the McGill history department; Concordia’s moreso. The youthful mood was frequently ahistorical, or anti-historical, diverting attention even from the two World Wars. Campus turmoil was also common in Britain, and the lively London newspapers were also soon giving lavish coverage to the Watergate uproar in Washington. But for the British in general, the two big wars retained a profound social meaning little seen in Canada outside Remembrance Day. Throughout the time I was there, not just in interviewing elderly Nobel Prize winners or taking notes from documents, but in conversations in pubs, I was repeatedly reminded of the 1930s, not as the time of the Great Depression, but as the years dominated by the rise of Hitler. by the failure of the League of Nations, by Chamberlain’s failed Munich agreement, and by the conclusion of the decade with the Hitler/Stalin pact, and the start of another World War.

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by Kevin Richard

The Purpose of the State

You know summer is indeed over when Parliament goes back to work. For some, this signals little more than the return of bickering background noise, while for others, this signals a passionate call for a return to arms. Regardless of the extent to which we pay attention to what goes on, and regardless of the extent to which we engage, as it begins to unfold we would do well, I believe, to reflect on what the role of the state is and what it should be. What is its task and in what areas should it intervene?

There are many disagreements over this most important question, with answers varying from “as much intervention as possible” to “as little intervention as possible”. I suspect, however, that a great many parliamentarians go about their business on an issue to issue basis, mostly out of good will no doubt, but also without being able to provide a principled and robust explanation as to why the intervention to which they hold dear, be it an action, policy, or program, should even finds itself within the jurisdiction of the state in the first place.

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by Neil Cameron

The Bright Countenance and the Obscuring Clouds

“… There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding. There is no question concerning public life, in which [mass man] does not intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his”opinions.”  

“…Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it.”

Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) in Revolt of the Masses (1930).

“…In today’s climate, it’s all -too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion on your campus or in the broader academic culture….Think for yourself.”

From an open letter of advice addressed to incoming university students by a group of liberal professors teaching at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, August 29, 2011.

Milton formulated his pleasant description of scholarly activity a few years before he wrote Paradise Lost. It was a visionary ideal, not an empirical account; in the actual colleges of the early 1600s, there was bitter conflict between supporters of the absolutist Stuart monarchy and the champions of Parliament, culminating in civil war. There was also plenty of more general riotous behaviour, much of it drunken. Francis Bacon claimed that students were made violent ‘for want of sufficient maintenance’, a little like the debt problem of students today.

Nonetheless, it was widely understood that the pursuit of truth was the university’s fundamental concern, however temporarily wayward the paths to it. For almost three hundred years after Milton’s death, ‘the bright countenance’ in his mind’s eye remained the central justification of university life. But by the late 19th century, the very idea of truth itself began to be undermined by various European thinkers, and over the 20th century, these notions percolated through society at large. Also, as higher education has come to be regarded as an entitlement, colleges and universities have grown exponentially since the 1960s, changing in quality as well as quantity.

This combination alarmed the classicist and philosopher Allan Bloom, who became a bestselling author with The Closing of the American Mind (1986), his astringent portrait of higher education after the 1960s. But even he was surpassed in pessimism and penetration by the ‘elitist’ Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, who has had permanent and worldwide impact with The Revolt of the Masses, a book of less than 200 pages he published in 1930; in print ever since.

Reading Ortega with an open mind can be an uncomfortable experience for everyone living today, including those who try to dismiss him as ‘reactionary’. This labelling substitute for serious critical thought is exactly what he shows as hollow. His own truths are not subjectivist and relativist, but timeless, almost as mathematical proofs invented by Greek thinkers over two thousand years ago retain their validity forever.

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by William Gairdner

The Feminist Pay-Equity Scam

Almost everyone misunderstands so-called “pay-equity.” They think it is a fair-sounding idea that basically says any two human beings, regardless of gender, should be paid the same if they do the same work. But pay-equity is not about that at all.

The principle of paying people the same wage for the same work has long since been accepted as fair by almost everyone; (although some economists still say that even this custom limits the freedom of individuals to offer their services for less, if they so desire, and is thus a form of minimum-wage legislation that discriminates against the very poor). But radical feminists are not satisfied with the rule that women and men must be paid the same wage for the same work. They want them to be paid the same for different work; if they can show that different kinds of work have the same “value.”

For example, if a government consultant can show that a female computer-operator’s job has the same “value” as a male truck-driver’s job, then the government will order that the two must be paid the same. Presto – gender equality in the market place! But there’s a twist, of course: this applies only to women. If he makes more than she does, she can complain to the government, get the “value” of her job assessed in her favour and then force her boss to pay her the same as the truck driver. But if she makes more than he does, he cannot use the same argument to force his boss to pay him the same as her! But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s backtrack for a minute.

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by Neil Cameron

H. G. Wells and his Enduring Weapons of Mass Instruction

No writer of the 20th century has had, and still has, more influence on the public imagination  than Herbert George (always ‘H.. G.’) Wells (1866 –1946). But while becoming a world-renowned traveling public figure as well, no enthusiast for science as a new religion, and for a utopian and socialist reconstruction of all human society, had such an absence of practical effect, including on political leaders who often gave him public praise. He lived long enough to see the Second World War conclude with the two atomic bombings on Japan, and when he died a few months later, was an embittered man. His last and little-remembered small work was called Mind at the End of its Tether, in which he declared his disillusionment with the human race.

This bleak conclusion followed his last two decades of voluminous but hastily-written and instantly-forgotten books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. The exception was his widely-read 1934 Experiment in Autobiography, delighting readers almost as much as his early and brilliant science fiction tales, and bringing him a gushing letter of praise from Franklin Roosevelt, which exulted ‘…our [sic] biggest success is in making people think.’ FDR was then creating his New Deal ‘brains trust’, which did somewhat resemble one of Wells’s many calls for the establishment of such expert cabals. But the need for ‘scientific planners’ was a popular commonplace in the 1930s anyway: American New Dealers and Soviet Communists could alike look back to such proposals from the French Enlightenment’s Henri de Saint-Simon, and even to Plato.

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by Kevin Richard

That Which Unites Our Dominion

As we celebrate 150 years of confederation there is much discussion around the question of a Canadian identity and around what unites us as a country. Many believe that there is no core Canadian identity, no real heritage of value, and that all that unites us is our diversity. When looking back to those who founded this country, however, you will find that this diverse group of men united not on the basis of their differences, but on the basis of that which they shared, that is, a common heritage and a common set of values and beliefs. We would do well, I believe, to celebrate these things with the same vigour we celebrate diversity itself.

While proponents of confederation were in general agreement as to the desirability of this project, there was a fair amount of disagreement as to how to make it a reality, as well as how to unite the people around a common identity. They began, therefore, with the recognition of our common heritage in the Crown and of all that had been achieved under it. In the Legislative Assembly of the United Province of Canada (1865), Richard Cartwright, influential politician and orator, explained that Canada should indeed “cherish and preserve those time-honoured associations our American neighbours have seen fit so recklessly to cast away.”

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by Neil Cameron

Truth, Trust, Trend and Trump

Time magazine has lost most of the influence it once had, but not its flair for striking covers. A spring one asked, in bold red lettering on a black background, “Is Truth Dead?”. They used the same cover format as they had once in 1966, then asking “Is God Dead?”. But that had been a late popular reflection on Nietzsche’s philosophical assertion that this was the case. The cover and content this time were current and narrow, and better replaced by “Has Trump Killed Truth?”.

Either choice recalls G. K. Chesterton’s wise priest, Father Brown, explaining we should worry less about wrong answers, more whether we are asking the right question. Perhaps Nietzsche was doing so, as was the cooler but epistemologically similar David Hume, but maybe should not have published their obituaries. Both of them were revolutionary philosopher-theologians and historians of ideas, ever afterwards misunderstood and misapplied as destructive gravediggers. All “searches for Truth with a capital T” can be defined as “searches for God with a capital G,” including those made by atheists, despite some insisting otherwise. It has been, and likely will continue to be, an eternal and worldwide search. For Western European civilization, it can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophers, Jewish prophets, Roman statesmen, and Christian synthesizers; then only partially recast by Enlightenment philosophers. Later philosophers, in the English-speaking world, after Bertrand Russell, have largely scaled down Truth-seeking to analyses of the language we use when turning to “ultimate questions.”

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