by Neil Cameron

Marching into 2019

Each year about this time, Senior Discourse Contributor, Neil Cameron, provides friends and readers with a characteristically witty piece of doggerel musing on the passage and meaning of recent events. This year we find ourselves singing to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers” and it goes like this:

Onward, green millennials, fearing global heat;

But the old and sceptic, aren’t much in retreat.

Cars must be el-ectric, driverless as well;

Couples on their bi-kes slick, driving trucks as well.

Onward green millennials, in Suzuki’s spell.

 

Onward, active natives, blocking all pipelines;

Trees get super-latives, trumping wells and mines.

Down with rich employ-ers, up with tribal pride,

Bring on hordes of law-yers, rising nationwide.

Onward active natives, surfing on green tide.

 

Onward tory Pre-miers, hearing voters’ groans;

Out with Lib’ral drea-miers, on their Chinese phones.

Ford fights carbon ta-xes, Legault limits pot,

Western NDP ax-is, sighs and joins the lot.

Onward tory Pre-miers, battles to be fought.

 

Onward profs in col-lege, fearing sullen mobs;

Not much seeking know-ledge, just in search of jobs.

Finding grounds for of-fense, now a classroom skill,

Aiding all the more dense, now enact their will.

Onward, profs in col-lege, some teach thinking still.

 

Onward, Marg’ret A-twood, and the Canlit horde;

Dreaming of book prizes, at the festal board.

Divers’ty’s their watchword, white males now all dead;

Prize money their pa-ssword, only few get read.

Onward, Canlit legions, begging still for bread.

 

Onward, pipeline buil-ders, oil sands workers, too;

Though new world bewil-ders, seen as witches’ brew.

Black gold just stays black lead, if not reaching ports;

Greens and natives now are wed, and blocking oil in courts.

Onward pipeline buil-ders, wailing at aborts.

 

Onward, Justin Tru-deau, no more fancy dress;

Trips have not won kudos, dance did not impress.

Once inviting masses in, swamped by refugees,

All have had their classes in his apologies.

Onward, saintly Justin, but less saintly, please.

 

Onward, all to-gether, Canada rolls on;

While we wonder whether, facing dark or dawn.

Join in Christmas so-ng fests , as at modest price,

We can bear these sma-ll pests, just by staying nice.

Onward bless’d Canad-a. humdrum paradise.

(Neil’s piece, along with his other historical essays are first posted on the Montreal e-journal, Prince Arthur Herald.)

by William Brooks

A View From Canada: American Democrats Should Worry Us All

Over the last 100 years America’s progressive elites have made their home in the Democratic Party. Progressive leaders like Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, along with legions of supporters in academia, journalism, public service, education, entertainment and the arts have been moving that country’s vital centre further and further away from its early origins in classical liberalism, constitutional government and moral custom.

From time to time the international left’s will to dominance has been slowed down by the appearance of countervailing conservative intellectual movements and larger-than-life figures like John F. Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Donald J. Trump; but as the free world prepares to enter the third decade of the 21st century; the USA, once Canada’s strongest and most reliable ally in defence of liberty, may be on the way to becoming a shadow of its former self.

Suicide of the West

In his recent book, Suicide of the West:How the Rebirth of Tribalism. Populism and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, Senior National Review Editor, Jonah Goldberg pointed out that the development of constitutional democracy and the “Miracle” of democratic capitalism had an enormously positive effect on the West which eventually spread throughout the world. “The results” he said, “were inescapable: nearly everywhere on the planet men and women lived longer, ate better, enjoyed more leisure, and had access to resources and delights that previously had been reserved for the very rich and powerful, or more commonly, had been utterly unknown.” Along similar lines, British historian, Andrew Roberts, in A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, has argued that the “Miracle” described by Goldberg had important beginnings in Anglo-Saxon England.

Over the last half century, however, the allegedly “privileged history” of Anglo-Saxons has become the subject of fierce criticism by post modern historical revisionists who view the past behaviour of our English-speaking forefathers as inherently evil, entirely self-serving and oppressively patriarchal.

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by Neil Cameron

The Notwithstanding Clause from Bourassa to Legault

 

Francois Legault, full of confidence with the surprising scale of his CAQ electoral victory, is currently threatening to make use of the Notwithstanding Clause to insulate his proposed immigration restrictions from court challenges. He may go through with it even in the face of substantial public opposition, particularly in Montreal. But if he does, I hope that the public debate will distinguish between arguments about the substance of his proposals from arguments about the ‘legitimacy’ of the Clause itself. It was introduced in the constitutional negotiations of 1982 as a quite defensible compromise feature of the Charter, both to avoid the kind of juridical absolutism that has caused so much grief in the United States, and to preserve the democratic powers of the provinces from oppressive federal centralization.

Even if one intensely dislikes some specific application of the Clause, that does not demonstrate that Canada would be better off if it could somehow be rescinded, unlikely in any case. Individual citizens or groups of citizens in functioning democracies may quite often find themselves disliking particular laws introduced by elected governments. including ones that they voted for. But that dislike is not alone justification for unlimited opposition, to the point of disobeying such laws. Both in the past and at present, this ordinary requirement can be obscured by deafening cries about ‘rights’, a word with unlimited possibilities for producing insoluble conflicts between clashing interests. It makes more sense to concentrate public support or opposition on the substance of the policies that appear to require the use of the Clause.

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by Kevin Richard

Social solidarity must be voluntary!

It is often said that Manon Massé performed better than expected in the recent Quebec provincial election debates, and that this has resulted in a newfound curiosity with Quebec Solidaire, as demonstrated by a hike in support according to recent polls. Beyond good debate performances, support for sovereignty, and promises of free services, what exactly are the principles by which this party is guided?

The answer, in part, is found in its title. QS claims to be a movement of social solidarity, and its main objective, according to its website, is for all action to be based on the real needs of the population. So there it is, QS wants to use the legislature and the machinery of the state to address and satisfy our real needs.

At first glance such principles can seem noble. But once the nature of the state is properly understood, one can only conclude that QS’s program is not only destined for failure, but also for the impoverishment of the province, and that behind its veil of nobility lies a patronizing and ideological autocracy.

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by Kevin Richard

Diversity is Not Off-Limits For Discussion

It’s rather troubling to know that at this very moment, after merely reading the headline of this article, there are some who have already condemned me as a racist bigot and an intolerant xenophobe, regardless of what follows in the text, and regardless of what I embody and live. At least, this is what I am led to believe by the overreactions to Maxime Bernier’s most recent tweets.

Mr. Bernier dared question the sanctity of Trudeau’s adoration and mystical use of the D-word, as though it’s mere utterance carries transcendent power. In boringly predictable fashion, and in a fine display of the cultish element Bernier was referring to, backlash from diversity’s religious community was harsh and swift. The ideologically possessed broke out into their usual broken-record songs of “ists”, “isms”, and “phobes”, not realising that their overuse of such terms have eroded much of their meaning over time.

For those who actually want to take the time to discuss and think things through, however, the role of diversity in our national identity is not off-limits for discussion. Diversity, on its own, is a rather vague term. In relation to our national identity, it seems to be only partial in description. We are a nation of people that can trace their ethnic and cultural origins from a great many places, but what is it about this fact that binds us together under a banner of national unity?

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by Neil Cameron

The The Mortgaged Decade: 1998-2008 and the Long Hangover

On July 11, 2008, Countrywide Financial, a huge California mortgage broker, bankrupted. It was one of many financial industry blowups of that disastrous year. Bear Stearns had already collapsed in March, nearly bringing down its largest Wall Street investment banking rivals, even Goldman Sachs, and by fall epidemic devastation required multi-billion dollar government bailouts. But Countrywide, and its once-admired but henceforward reviled CEO, Angelo Mozilo, perfectly incarnated the financial folly and hubris of the whole preceding ten years.

Countless books and TV documentaries about the 2008 Crash have since appeared, full of explanations and accusations. The best ones have identified most of the proximate causes of the disaster, all including the proliferating ‘subprime’ mortgages and complex derivatives based on them. But most were deficient in providing historical context. The most dubious claim, made by many academic economists and governmental authorities, was that ‘no one had seen this coming’. In reality, lots of people had, including me, with a 2003 Policy Options article, ‘Risky Business and Rocket Science’, about dodgy ‘mathematical’ models to justify many dazzling baubles.

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by William Brooks

The Lefts’s Long March Through Our Classrooms: Can it ever be reversed?

When I started teaching in the late 1960s there were still unresolved issues between “traditional teachers” and “progressive educators”. Traditional teachers usually held academic degrees in particular disciplines; like history, literature, math or chemistry. Progressives typically held degrees in “education”.

With regard to the curriculum, the two camps differed over the relative importance of “what to teach” and “how to teach.” The traditionalists focused on the content of the lesson. Progressives professed to be interested in how students learn. Traditionalists commonly used direct instruction and Socratic discourse. Progressives sought to organize “cooperative learning experiences” that were to produce “critical thinking” skills.

Over the years, serious academics on both sides of the political spectrum, claimed that progressive teaching practices dumbed down the curriculum and emptied the content of the humanities. For whatever reason, academic standards over the last half century tumbled faster than a Soviet gymnast on steroids and the spirit of open-ended, rational inquiry sunk to an all time low. Over the same period political consciousness among students rose to 18th century revolutionary levels. Teachers’ unions became more radical and more partisan. We aligned with left-wing political parties from which we won higher salaries. We sought graduate degrees from progressive education faculties; which qualified us for even higher salaries and influential positions in the educational establishment. By the end of the 1970s we had transformed teaching from a low-paying, rather prestigious, “vocation” to a relatively well-paid, adversarial “mission”.

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by Neil Cameron

Two Psychological Televangelists

Canada has long been an incubator of ‘public intellectuals’ achieving international acclaim, from Marshall McLuhan to Malcolm Gladwell. Lately, two academic psychologists have cast nearly all rivals for public attention into the shade: Steven Pinker, evolutionary psychologist, language theorist, and popularizer of science-based humanism, and Jordan Peterson, psychoanalytical analyst of of individual abnormality and political pathology.

Both have Montreal connections. Pinker was born here (1954), and studied at Dawson College and McGill, before parting for several American Ivy League appointments and settling into a Harvard professorship, Peterson, eight years younger, after growing up and beginning his college life in Alberta, took his Ph.D. at McGill, He spent some years of his own at Harvard, but returned to Canada to teach at the U. of Toronto. Both show some stigmata of their age cohort. Pinker is a baby boomer from the classic boomer years, those entering late adolescence in the great upheaval decade of 1965-75, while Peterson is from the tail end of the boom, he and others in this age group entering their university years as the radical fevers of the late 1960s, while still burning, were being accompanied by second thoughts and multiple disillusions.

Ever since the 1920s, psychologists and psychoanalysts have made a great noise in the U.S. as a secular or quasi-secular new clergy. Most of the older generation were e’migre’ Europeans, Freudian or near-Freudian. Throughout the century, bookstores, newsstand magazines, and even mass circulation newspapers featured regular pontifications from Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, Bruno Bettelheim, Viktor Frankl, and Erik Erikson, all born around 1900. Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ invaded business courses in marketing; Bettekheim and Frankl drew on personal experience in Nazi concentration camps in theorizing about victims and their victimizers.  Erikson entranced some readers and exasperated others by providing ingenious but highly speculative interpretations of Martin Luther and Gandhi. Pinker and Peterson have probably outdone them all in at least immediate impact, however, able to reach a much wider audience through far more TV appearances and YouTube videos, Peterson having become an astonishing phenomenon on the latter.

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by Kevin Richard

Trudeau Underestimates the Power of Ideas

The New York Times recently posted a 2016 podcast interview of a returning Canadian ISIS fighter, known as Abu Huzaifa, who confessed to committing an execution-style murder while in Syria, which he now unconvincingly denies. He is believed to be living in Toronto and he is apparently known to the authorities. The Conservative opposition is in an uproar over these revelations, as they would have preferred that re-entry be denied to such individuals in the first place, as is the case in the UK.

One may reasonably conclude that in spite of the permitted re-entry of ISIS fighters, our national security forces are on top of it, and that Huzaifa, and those like him, will simply have to face justice here at home. The trouble, however, is that such an outcome is highly unlikely. Building a case on events that occurred a few years ago in a foreign war-torn country is extremely difficult, something the Trudeau government undoubtedly realizes.

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by Neil Cameron

Tesla Technophilia and Little Miss Marker’s View

Tesla, Inc. is suddenly in deep trouble, with both its cars and its stock market valuation. Elon Musk has expanded far beyond the original Tesla Motors, created by two talented electrical engineers in the 1990s. They were eventually shoved aside by Musk, although they were responsible for putting Tesla on the map with the pretty ‘Roadster’ sports car, its design and construction drawing partly on the small but expert English Lotus company, while the Americans provided the electric motor and  associated components. But Musk, their largest investor, soon began to build a far larger operation, not just making cars, but working on steadily improving lithium batteries and other high tech products, growing in the last four years to over 37,000 employees (see the fascinating account, ‘The Making of Tesla; Invention, Betrayal, and the Birth of the Roadster’, Drake Baer, Business Insider, 11.11.14). But the firm, facing many technical and financial problems throughout its history, has been hit hard since the fatal and fiery crash of one of its cars testing the self-driving ‘autopilot’ last May, and Musk is now dealing with other failures, including a giant recall.

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