In my opening remarks to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta “Freedom Talk” on “The Decline of Western Civilization: Our Fate or Our Choice?” in Red Deer, I said the fight to save Western civilization is fought first and foremost on the field of ideas.
In my closing remarks to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta “Freedom Talk” conference in Red Deer on “The Decline of Western Civilization: Our Fate or Our Choice?” I urged people to go forth with joyful hope.
“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.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I can no longer avoid asking a question that once seemed crazy: Is the Prime Minister of Canada actively assisting powers hostile to this country, from ideological or personal motives?
In a talk to the Augustine College Summer Seminar I argued that the American Revolution brought liberty and prosperity because it looked back to the solid foundations of Magna Carta, Christianity and the Western tradition, while the French Revolution brought misery and death because it looked forward to a utopian future unconstrained by the past.
“As Justice Jamie Campbell once wrote, ‘The Charter is not a blueprint for moral conformity. Its purpose is to protect the citizen from the power of the state, not to enforce compliance by citizens or private institutions with the moral judgements of the state.’ Trinity Western University v. Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society, 2015 NSSC25, at para. 10. Sadly, this clear thinking was not followed by a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada in a similar case, where seven of nine judges ruled against Trinity Western University’s proposed Christian law school due to a perception the law school would discriminate against non-Christians.”
André Schutten and Michael Wagner, A Christian Citizenship Guide 2nd edition
“If discretion in personal diet is not among the liberties of a citizen, what is?”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Nov. 11, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)