This Thursday I told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR to insiders) to avoid getting distracted by issues like refining the criteria for federal funding of advanced research and instead to focus their limited resources including of time on core government responsibilities such as defence, infrastructure and justice that appear to be crumbling. Ironically my initial in-person appearance on Tuesday collapsed because they couldn’t make the translation work, which I thought rather proved my point about the state being overextended and lacking some fairly basic capacities. I think the concept of government doing less baffled many of the MPs. But you can watch my testimony given Thursday via videoconference starting at timecode 16:11:33 and judge for yourselves.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say that Members of Parliament need to be focused on the core, and crumbling, functions of government rather than getting distracted by exotica like advanced research criteria. The state can’t and shouldn’t do everything, and at the moment it’s not doing much of anything properly in Canada, so worry about the tax code not the genetic code, defence not dark matter, and deficits not dilithium. (It’s based on testimony I’m giving before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research on December 10.)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I take up my dusty cudgel on the crucial point that our whole system of government crumples if the legislators we elect cannot control the executive we do not elect. It was true in the days of Bad King John and George III, and it’s true in those of Justin Trudeau.

“To say [Garry] Geisel is appealing, of course, is to mean it only in the strictly legal sense.”

Linda Williamson in Ottawa Sun Oct. 4, 1999

“To speak of Dickens is to think of Bumble the beadle, and that carries our mind at once to a whole crowd of thick-headed magistrates, interfering philanthropists, tyrannical administrators of the Poor Law, and the like. Have you ever noticed the fact that in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Fielding, in the whole range of English literature, a person in petty authority, a minor official hardly ever appears, except to be made ridiculous? There seems to be a deep conviction in our minds that the man who carries some wand of office is more likely than other men to be half knave and wholly fool.”

Transcript from the improbably surviving one of two records used to transport C.S. Lewis’s May 1941 talk to Icelanders, which we don’t even know if it was ever broadcast, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“A year earlier, during the third week of April 1940, Lewis had read Christopher Dawson's Beyond Politics. What struck Lewis about the book was the distinction Dawson drew between the ideal of freedom and the ideal of democracy. The idea of democracy as propounded by Rousseau and embodied in the French Revolution placed its emphasis on the ‘general will’ of the community over against the individual. The idea of freedom as expressed by the English placed its emphasis on the rights of the individual over against the will of the whole. Dawson traced modern English notions of freedom to the nonconformists of the 17th century, who sought religious liberty, and to the English aristocracy, which asserted its rights over against the Crown. Dawson concluded that without freedom, modern democracy and modern dictatorship are ‘twin children of the Revolution’ with their emphasis on the community or collective or state. Jack told [his brother] Warnie that he thought this view explained a great deal about the difference between the English and the European democracies. The French offered no exemption from military service for a conscientious objector, but the English did, even if reluctantly. This also explained the political alliance in the 17th and 18th centuries in England between the great nobility and the nonconformist merchant class. It was never the marriage of convenience as some supposed but a marriage of conviction. This view also explained to Jack why he and Warnie he felt so strongly about freedom but less so about democracy. These observations would not have risen to much more than a passing interest, except they became the thesis of C.S. Lewis’s first radio broadcast in May 1941.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“Will you permit the sacred fire of liberty, brought by your fathers from the venerable temples of Britain, to be quenched and trodden out on the simple altars they have raised?”

Joseph Howe [in appealing to a jury Halifax in 1835 to acquit him on libel charges because what he’d published was true even though at that time truth was not a defence in British law, which they did, thus engaging in “jury nullification” to uphold that liberty] in Dennis Gruending, ed., Great Canadian Speeches

In my latest Mercatornet column I ask how the United States, of all places, could have become vulnerable to tyranny.