On April 14 I had the pleasure of moderating a True Strong & Free Network discussion on the Charter at 40 featuring Suzanne Anton QC, former attorney general of British Columbia and former crown prosecutor, Bruce Pardy, executive director of Rights Probe and a professor of law at Queen's University, and the last living drafter and signatory of the 1982 Constitution, Brian Peckford PC
In my latest National Post column I say what should be solid in Canadian government, like our Charter rights, is generally blown away while what is vapid, like the Liberal-NDP deal, lands with a thud.
“Of all political ideals, that of making people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one. It leads invariably to the attempt to impose our scale of ‘higher’ values upon others, in order to make them realize what seems to us of greatest importance for their happiness; in order, as it were, to save their souls.”
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2
“Liberty underlies the entire enterprise; it’s not just one more vector in an indifference curve.”
Walter Block in Michael A. Walker, ed. Freedom Democracy and Economic Welfare: Proceedings of an International Symposium
“It may be that a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.”
Friedrich Hayek “The Intellectuals and Socialism”
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask whether the shock of Russia invading Ukraine, and the mostly commendable Western response, will make Canadians and their governments more serious about defence spending and therefore about budgeting generally.
“But the spiritual life is not a democracy.”
Bishop Robert Barron in “Is Jesus the King of Your Life?” (right after praising political democracy and condemning this-world monarchy) https://youtu.be/tICxaSQFJGo?t=761
In my latest National Post column (filed before the invasion of Ukraine) I mock the government for encouraging us to switch providers to get lower prices and better service through the magic of competition, while subjecting vast swaths of the economy and our lives to its monopoly control