Posts in Constitution
Words Worth Noting - September 25, 2025

After noting that French Canadians put up passively with the Stamp Act “Carlton had to deal with the problem of the law: the French liked the swiftness and low cost of court access under the French system, but it was a different law, governed by French precedent, which was irritating in itself and practically incomprehensible to the administration in Quebec and difficult to obtain. The substitution of English criminal law had been popular with the public, as it instituted habeas corpus and put an end to the rack and interrogation under torture. London sent legal officers to go back to make a recommendation, and this issue dragged on for a few years, but Carlton became convinced that Quebec needed to devise its own Civil Code, to keep what was familiar, incite pride, and emancipate the province from recourse to French precedents.”

Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present

Words Worth Noting - September 24, 2025

“In 1870, the Prussian army had captured the French emperor, Napoleon III, who followed Charles X, Metternich, and Louis-Philippe into exile in London.”

Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present [but he does not take what I consider to be the obvious point that all these continentals who sneer at the English-speaking world flee to it when in trouble, knowing it is the true and only home of liberty]

Words Worth Noting - September 10, 2025

“We shall have no more representatives of the sovereign making the doctrine of the Charleses and Jameses the standard by which to govern British subjects in the nineteenth century.”

Robert Baldwin of Baldwin-LaFontaine fame on their winning decisively in the Jan. 24, 1848 elections in Upper and Lower Canada, quoted by Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present

Words Worth Noting - September 6, 2025

“Philip, by the grace of God king of the French, to Boniface who acts as though he were pope, little or no greeting. Let your great fatuity know that in temporalities we are subject to no-one…”

Philip IV “the Fair” of France responding to a letter from Pope Boniface VIII rebuking the king for appointing clerics without regard to papal wishes, a letter that was conspicuously burned, quoted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300

Carney's enemies inside his own head

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the reason Mark Carney can’t pull us back from the left-wing idiocies of Justin Trudeau is that he holds substantially the same views and doesn’t even know it.

Government of the expert, by the expert, for the expert

In my latest Epoch Times column I say from coast to coast Canada is turning away from trusting the people and abandoning self-government for meddlesome ineffective presumption.