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.
“I have a pretty worrying hunch that despite all the talk of Team Canada and visits to D.C., our premiers aren’t doing much to get this country battle ready. Too many of them, after a career in Canadian politics, are probably too stuck in their ways of ‘the announcement is the plan.’”
Matt Gurney in The Line Feb. 13, 2025 [https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-i-hereby-propose-the]. [I emailed him to ask if it was original and he replied “I think it’s original to me” but added that it had evolved from conversations with his colleagues, especially Jen Gerson]
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.
“‘The two greatest problems in history,’ says a brilliant scholar of our time, are ‘how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.’ We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
In my latest National Post column I condemn Canadians’ support for compulsory youth service to give us free money not defend freedom.
“The truth is that the Imperial movement going on around us has few of the marks of patriotism. Above all, it lacks one essential quality, and closely connected with the sense of sudden antiquity of which I have spoken, a quality which it is very difficult, perhaps, accurately to define. Perhaps the best phrase for it would be an exultant melancholy. These old war ballads do not dwell upon victory to anything like the extent to which they dwell upon defeat, disaster, the darkness which alone leaves visible the single star of fidelity. The hero of all these songs is not the triumphant hero in the car; their hero is the last man by the flag. The only strong nation and the only strong empire is the nation or the empire that has before it continually this vision of its own final disaster and its own final defiance. There is no success for anything which we do not love more than success. There lies in patriotism, as in every form of love, a great peril, a peril of self-committal, which, while it scares the prudent, fascinates the brave. But this spirit of noble peril and melancholy, which runs from end to end of the patriotic poetry of the world, is just the note which is lacking in current Imperial patriotism…”
G.K. Chesterton in “Patriotic Poetry” in Daily News Nov. 29, 1901, reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
In my latest Epoch Times column I ridicule the government for thinking the solution to the taxman riding roughshod over citizens’ rights is to get him bigger boots.
“no Roman citizen, as every reader of the Acts of the Apostles knows, could be scourged, tortured, or put to death over his appeal to the emperor.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and everyone knew it then, Christian or not, whereas nowadays I wouldn’t count on most state-educated people to understand any part of that sentence]