From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

The country our ancestors built is being torn down. The welfare state runs on massive deficits, increasing our public fiscal slavery. Cancel culture kills free speech. The government funds the Anti-Hate Network to oppose religious conservatives,  which negatively  stereotypes them.

Poet T.S. Elliot once wrote, “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” Canada has fallen but has all the illusion of being what it always was. Many Canadians fail to see a dystopian future foretold decades ago has arrived. Our institutions are failing us.

In Orwellian fashion, The Charter of Rights and Freedoms has transformed Canadian values in the pretense of upholding them. They eliminated federal laws that made Sunday a day of rest, forced the provision of abortion and euthanasia in the name of the security of the person, and banned prayer from city hall meetings in the name of religious freedom.

The pandemic cranked the judges’ distorted amp right up to 11. In B.C., Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson struck down public health orders banning protests, but quizzically maintained the ban on religious assembly. Elsewhere, the hypocrisy just continued, laws or no laws.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could bow the knee at Black Lives Matter protests that exceeded gathering limits, while those who did so for church services or rallies against mandates were prosecuted–or even persecuted. The Walmarts and Superstores were packed, while the churches and small businesses sat empty.

Doctors who prescribed ivermectin, one of the safest and widely effective drugs of all time, faced medical censure–even if their actions saved lives. Medical colleges became bodies that betray the profession’s values by banning medical opinions and the off-label use of drugs when it contradicts poor policies based on weak evidence.

The media, which should have been pushing back at this nonsense, went along with the charade as if it was the right thing to do. Any perspective that could foment doubt against the recommendations and policies of those in power was banned. Such is the practice of authoritarian countries, which is what Canada became.

As law professor Bruce Pardy has noted, Canada has shifted from the rule of law to the rule by laws. Here, legal systems manage the public and the law and courts fail to call the governments to account. A rally that’s permitted one minute can be trampled by the Emergencies Act the next, while  donors to a protest see their bank accounts seized. Did you lose your job for refusing a vaccine? Too bad. Oh, and you don’t get EI either.

The pandemic and its fear subsided, but neither sober reflection nor an adequate reckoning arrived. People kept getting COVID after the vaccinations, yet some are getting booster shots to this day. Analysts such as Denis Rancourt, credit public responses, including vaccines, for worldwide excess mortality of 17 million. Yet, the bombshell falls like a dud, either ignored or diffused by dismissive “fact-checkers.”  The life expectancy of Canadians dropped two full years and barely a shoulder was shrugged.

Even our elections fail to inspire confidence. In many municipalities, programmable computers count the votes and no one checks or scrutinizes the paper ballots. In other cases, paper ballots don’t exist–it’s all done on screen. A computer gets the trust a single individual would never receive.

The country our ancestors built is being torn down. The welfare state runs on massive deficits, increasing our public fiscal slavery. Cancel culture kills free speech. The government funds the Anti-Hate Network to oppose religious conservatives,  which negatively  stereotypes them.

Gender ideology, now entrenched in law and schools, is facilitating a wedge between traditional values and woke values and between parents and their children. It even challenges the objective truth of biological reality. Truth has become what we feel, overriding rational norms, facts, and our inherited society.

Like George Orwell’s 1984, if the government says 2 + 2 = 5, then that’s what it is, and anyone who fails to accept it becomes an enemy of the state. Orwell’s novel envisioned a time when false propaganda like “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery” would prevail. The dystopia has arrived. Anyone who refers to someone by their biological sex is accused of misgendering hate.

Unfortunately,the dark vision of Aldous Huxley is also unfolding. In 1958, the author of Brave New World Revisited predicted,

“By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms – elections, parliaments, supreme courts, and all the rest – will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the shows as they see fit.”

It’s especially sad to watch our elderly maintain trust in government and mainstream media narratives when the days they deserved it have left us. Like petrified wood, the forms of our institutions remain but their composition has entirely changed. Our democratic, legal, and media institutions, our schools and hospitals, are failing us badly.

Canada has fallen, but many Canadians can’t see it because there’s no rubble.

Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Religious freedoms and the right to worship have been a recognized hallmark of civilized societies for centuries. The preamble of Canada’s constitution says our country is built on the principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God and the rule of law. In defiance of both, almost 600 Canadian places of worship have suffered arson in recent years. Nothing could be more unCanadian.

The stats were revealed by Member of Parliament Marc Dalton following a formal inquiry to the federal government. The response showed 592 arsons had been set on places of worship between 2010 and 2022. they rose from 58 in 2020 to 90 in 2021, then down to 74 in 2022.

The peak coincides with claims made in May of 2021 that the remains of 215 school children had been discovered on the site of the former Kamloops Residential School.

Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a subsequent wave of church burnings “unacceptable and wrong” he also called their likely motivations “real and fully understandable.” This hardly doused the flames.

These arsons far outnumber those made on Canadian churches in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan, which opposed non-Protestants and non-whites. In those years the KKK desecrated Sarnia’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. They killed ten people when they set Saint-Boniface College in Winnipeg on fire. They also burned the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. In 1926, three Klan members were jailed after they blew up St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Barrie, Ont.

The Klan soon fizzled out, seemingly unlike these recent church burnings. The 110-year-old Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses Catholic church burned down in Trois-Rivières, Quebec last month, but whether arson was involved has not been confirmed.

The presence of bodies underneath the former residential school in Kamloops has not been confirmed either. A 1924 septic field could also account for soil anomalies found there by ground-penetrating radar. Eight million federal tax dollars spent to investigate the site have yielded no remains and details on how the money was spent are sketchy. It’s high time the site was excavated to confirm or rule out the graves and do autopsies on any corpses found there.

Federal funds also fuel the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), the Orwellian title for a group that fuels resentment against socially conservative organizations with negative characterizations. On August 7, CAHN published “40 Ways To Fight The Far-Right: Tactics for Community Activists in Canada” thanks to $640,000 from Ottawa.

“White boys and men make up the majority of people involved in hate-promoting movements,” the handbook explains. Pro-life and pro-parent groups, CAHN says, are among those “characterized by racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-2SLGBTQ+ views, and pro-colonialist/ anti-Indigenous bigotry.”

CAHN says the Catholic-dominated, pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition is a “hate movement.” Liberty Coalition Canada, a legal defence organization, and the activist organization Action4Canada are similarly denigrated for their alleged belief that Canada was founded on Christian values and attempts to reassert such values.

Meanwhile, the CAHN guide advocates “antifascist” doxing, including infiltration of right-leaning organizations. getting people fired, and ending friendships.

Dalton’s Bill C-411 the “Anti-Arson Act” would do more to deter hate-motivated crimes than CAHN ever will. The legislation would punish those who set fires and explosions at religious places. A first offence would get a mandatory five-year jail sentence, while subsequent offenses would prompt seven years.

When respect for the supremacy of God and the rule of law fail, rights give way to wrongs. It’s time to stop the fires and the disputable claims that fuel them, and restore respect for people of faith, their right to worship, and their places of worship.

Lee Harding is a Research Associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.