Quotulatiousness

August 18, 2023

When your friendly local bank turns into a branch of the Stasi

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the British bank — probably not the only one to do things like this — that compiled a “dossier” of information on one of their long-term clients with a view to de-banking him, his family, and associates. It might have worked if the client was a private citizen with no particular public profile, but the client was someone who absolutely is not that kind of man:

The following day, [National Westminster Bank CEO Alison] Rose resigned, admitting to “a serious error of judgment”. The value of the bank fell by more than $1 billion.

The weasel words of Ms. Rose and the bank board are worth examination. They deflected, and I suspect were intended to deflect, the main criticism directed at Ms. Rose and the bank: namely, that the bank had been involved in a scandalous and sinister surveillance of Mr. Farage’s political views and attempted to use them as a reason to deny him banking services, all in the name of their own political views, which they assumed to be beyond criticism or even discussion. The humble role of keeping his money, lending him money, or perhaps giving him financial advice, was not enough for them: they saw themselves as the guardians of correct political policy.

It was not that the words used to describe Mr. Farage were “inappropriate”, or even that they were libelous. It is that the bank saw fit to investigate and describe him at all, at least in the absence of any suspicion of fraud, money laundering, and so forth. “The error of judgment” to which Ms. Rose referred was not that she spoke to the BBC about his banking affairs (it is not easy to believe that she did so without malice, incidentally), but that she compiled a dossier on Farage in the first place — and then “error of judgment” is hardly a sufficient term on what was a blatant and even wicked attempt at instituting a form of totalitarianism.

This raises the question of whether one can be wicked without intending to be so, for it is quite clear that Ms. Rose had no real understanding, even after her resignation, of the sheer dangerousness and depravity of what the bank, under her direction, had done.

As for the board’s somewhat convoluted declaration that “after careful consideration, it concluded that it retains full confidence”, etc., it suggests that it was involved in an exercise of psychoanalytical self-examination rather than of an objective state of affairs: absurd, in the light of Ms. Rose’s resignation within twenty-four hours. The board, no more than Ms. Rose herself, understood what the essence of the problem was. For them, if there had been no publicity, there would have been no problem: so when Mr. Farage called for the dismissal of the board en masse, I sympathised with his view.

July 30, 2023

QotD: Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, History, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I’m not trying to cast Thomas Hobbes, of all people, as some kind of proto-Libertarian. The point is, for Hobbes, physical security was the overriding, indeed obsessive, concern. Indeed, Hobbes went so far as to make his peace with Oliver Cromwell, for two reasons: First, his own physical safety was threatened in his Parisian exile (a religious thing, irrelevant). Second, and most importantly, Cromwell was the Leviathan. The Civil Wars didn’t turn out quite like Hobbes thought they would, but regardless, Cromwell’s was the actually existing government. It really did have the power, and when you boil it down, whether the actually existing ruler is a Prince or a Leviathan or something else, might makes right.

One last point before we close: As we’ve noted here probably ad nauseam, modern English is far less Latinate than the idiom of Hobbes’s day. Hobbes translated Leviathan into Latin himself, and while I’m not going to cite it (not least because I myself don’t read Latin), it’s crucial to note that, for the speakers of Hobbes’s brand of English, “right” is a direction – the opposite of left.

I’m oversimplifying for clarity, because it’s crucial that we get this – when the Barons at Runnymede, Thomas Hobbes, hell, even Thomas Jefferson talked about “rights”, they might’ve used the English word, but they were thinking in Latin. They meant ius – as in, ius gentium (the right of peoples, “international law”), ius civile (“civil law”, originally the laws of the City of Rome itself), etc. Thus, if Hobbes had said “might makes right” – which he actually did say, or damn close, Leviathan, passim – he would’ve meant something like “might makes ius“. Might legitimates, in other words – the actually existing power is legitimate, because it exists.

We Postmoderns, who speak only English, get confused by the many contradictory senses of “right”. The phrase “might makes right” horrifies us (at least, when a Republican is president) because we take it to mean “might makes correct” – that any action of the government at all is legally, ethically, morally ok, simply because the government did it. Even Machiavelli, who truly did believe that might makes ius, would laugh at this – or, I should say, especially Machiavelli, as he explicitly urges his Prince, who by definition has ius, to horribly immoral, unethical, “illegal” (in the “law of nations” sense) behavior.

So let’s clarify: Might legitimates. That doesn’t roll off the tongue like the other phrase, but it avoids a lot of confusion.

Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.

July 22, 2023

“… no-one has a ‘right’ to a bank account …”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Unlike in Canada, where the extra-legal debanking of an unknown number of what Justin Trudeau described as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” had all the bien-pensants in and out of the legacy media nodding along, British opinion is not so friendly toward the extra-legal debanking of Nigel Farage and his family and friends:

An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, a hardline capitalist (so he says) made a comment that no-one has a “right” to a bank account, as they don’t have “rights” (those inverted commas are doing a lot of work here) to healthcare, education, paid-for holidays, etc. He was, of course, writing about the Nigel Farage/Coutts saga that has seen the CEO of NatWest, Coutts’ parent firm (39% owned by the taxpayer) issue a sort-of apology to the former UKIP leader.

[…]

When a person is “debanked” today, they can have a problem opening an account anywhere else if the bank asks them why they left a bank in the past. As a result, we have almost a sort of “cartel” system operating.

In time, hopefully, competition will swing back, and some of the nonsense going on will disappear. In the meantime, while I agree with you that the idea of having a “right” to a bank account is as bogus as many of the other “rights” that people talk about today, the fact that banking is such an embedded form of life in a modern economy means this issue hits hard in a way that, say, isn’t the case if you are banned from a pizza restaurant or candy store for holding the “wrong” views. Of course, it may be that the Farage case might encourage a firm to go out of its way to court business from those who have been targeted. Let’s hope so. For example, a bank could, without incurring wrath from the “woke” or regulators, say something like “Banking is all we do. No politics. No agendas. Just finance.”

And as I have said before, the outrageous Nigel Farage case, and that of others, surely demonstrates that a central bank digital currency idea must be resisted. This would be the end of any financial autonomy at all.

As you’d expect, Brendan O’Neill isn’t a fan of this latest attempt to make certain political viewpoints effectively illegal:

So there you have it. Nigel Farage really was given the boot from the prestigious private bank Coutts because of his political views. Because he is very pro-Brexit, is fond of Donald Trump and has been critical of Black Lives Matter. Because, in the words of an extraordinary internal dossier compiled by Coutts, his views “do not align’ with the bank’s values”. For the past fortnight the chattering classes have been chortling over Farage’s claim that Coutts was persecuting him for his political beliefs. How dumb – worse, how complacent in the face of corporate tyranny – those people look now.

Last month, Farage went public about the closure of his Coutts account. I’ve been given the heave-ho for political reasons, he said. He also said that nine other banks have since rejected his custom. Now he has published a dossier that was distributed at a meeting of Coutts’ “reputational risk committee” on 17 November 2022. It is a truly chilling read. It runs to 36 pages. There is a strong case for “exiting” Farage from the bank, it says, because his publicly stated views are “at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The Stasi once compiled dossiers on dissident activists and artists whose views ran counter to those of the GDR regime. Now Coutts seems to be doing similar on customers who dare to bristle against the regime of woke.

The dossier basically finds Farage guilty of wrongthink. It highlights his renegade views not only on Brexit and Trump but also on Net Zero and even on King Charles – he has had the audacity to criticise His Majesty. Like dissidents in East Germany, his friendships are held against him, too. His links with Trump and tennis champ Novak Djokovic make him suspect, apparently. The dossier quotes the Independent‘s description of Farage’s visit to Djokovic’s trophy room in Belgrade, during which he criticised Australia’s expulsion of Djokovic for failing to get vaccinated against Covid, as “the spineless, chaotic behaviour of a chancer”.

[…]

The Farage / Coutts story is important because it highlights what a huge threat woke capitalism poses to freedom and fairness. Let’s be clear about what has happened here: a man has been economically unpersoned for having the supposedly wrong views. He’s been blacklisted for being a little too dissenting on the big issues of the day. And it’s happening to others, too – including people who do not have access to the same media platforms as Farage and thus have little leeway to protest against their expulsion from economic life by unelected, unaccountable banks and businesses. We acquiesce to this capitalist policing of thought at our peril. It is surely time for the government to act and clip the wings of banks and companies that believe they have the right to penalise citizens for the contents of their conscience. It might be Farage today, it could be you tomorrow.

Theodore Dalrymple sees it as a sign of the rise of woke totalitarianism:

It isn’t a question of whether Mr. Farage is always right or sometimes horribly wrong; when the bank says that it “uncovered” something that he said, as if he had recorded saying it by secret microphones, it makes itself ridiculous. Not even his worst enemies, or perhaps his best friends, would accuse him of hiding his light under a bushel.

The question is whether it’s the role of a bank to examine its clients’ views and deny them service if those views don’t accord with those of the chief executive, as if the latter were indisputably true and from which it were heresy to dissent. Is a bank an inquisition?

The chief executive of the parent bank, Alison Rose, said soon after her appointment that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her work, and on the occasion of the so-called Pride month last year said that “our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families, and businesses”. This year, the company headquarters were covered in the rainbow colors of the LGBT flag, with lettering the height of humans declaring the “Championing the power of Pride”. Under her leadership, staff may “identify” as women and men on alternate days, should they so wish.

Of course, when she said that “diversity” and “inclusion” was “integral to our purpose”, she was using these terms in a strictly technical sense to mean “everyone who thinks as I do and has a fair bit of money”. The diversity “integral” to the “purpose” of Coutts doesn’t include those persons with less than $1 million to deposit, who even in these days of currency depreciation remain a small minority. People bank with Coutts because it’s exclusive, not inclusive.

The chief executive, however, is safely within what we might call the Coutts Community, because she was paid about $5.2 million last year. The prospect of being barred from the bank will no doubt inhibit anyone who banks with her banks from suggesting in public that she’s paid too much.

January 23, 2023

Who was John Wilkes?

Filed under: Britain, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lawrence W. Reed on the life of John Wilkes, a British parliamentarian in the reign of George III:

John Wilkes (1725-1797)
Cropped from a larger painting entitled “John Glynn, John Wilkes and John Horne Tooke” in the National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

In the long history of memorably scintillating exchanges between British parliamentarians, one ranks as my personal favorite. Though attribution is sometimes disputed, it seems most likely that the principals were John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, and the member from Middlesex, John Wilkes.

Montagu: Sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox.

Wilkes: That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your lordship’s principles or your mistress.

Repartee doesn’t get much better than that. And it certainly fits the style and reputation of Wilkes. Once when a constituent told him he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes famously responded, “Naturally. And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?”

Wilkes deserves applause for his rapier wit, but also for something much more important: challenging the arrogance of power. He was known in his day as a “radical” on the matter. Today, we might label him “libertarian” in principles and policy and perhaps even “libertine” in personal habits (he was a notorious womanizer). His pugnacious quarrels with a King and a Prime Minister are my focus in this essay.

Born in London in 1725, Wilkes in his adult life was cursed with bad looks. Widely known as “the ugliest man in England”, he countered his unattractive countenance with eloquence, humor, and an eagerness to assault the powers-that-be with truth as he saw it. Fortunately, the voters in Middlesex appreciated his boldness more than his appearance. He charmed his way into election to the House of Commons as a devotee of William Pitt the Elder and, like Pitt, became a vociferous opponent of King George III’s war against the American colonies.

Pitt’s successor as PM in 1762, Lord Bute of Scotland, earned the wrath of Wilkes for the whole of his brief premiership. Bute negotiated the treaty that ended the Seven Years War (known in America as the French & Indian War), which Wilkes thought gave too many concessions to the French. Wilkes also opposed Bute’s plan to tax the Americans to pay for the war.

[…]

George III took it personally. He ordered the arrest of Wilkes and dozens of his followers on charges of seditious libel. For most of the nearly thousand years of British monarchy, kings would have remanded foes like Wilkes to the gallows forthwith. But as a measure of the steady progress of British liberty (from Magna Carta in 1215 through the English Bill of Rights in 1689), the case went to the courts.

Wilkes argued that as a member of Parliament, he was exempt from libel charges against the monarch. The Lord Chief Justice agreed. Wilkes was released and took his seat again in the House of Commons. He resumed his attacks on the government, Bute’s successor George Grenville in particular.

November 19, 2022

QotD: Canada from the American Revolution to the Riel Rebellion

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Quotations, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A significant number of Americans who were loyal to Britain and despised the American Revolution moved to Canada during and in the decades after the Revolutionary War. And as the number of English Canadians steadily increased along the Great Lakes and west of the Ottawa River, [Sir Guy] Carleton created what became the province of Ontario, Upper Canada, in 1791. The first lieutenant governor, John Graves Simcoe, devised and implemented an ambitious program of enticing Americans to Canada by effectively giving them rich farmland. The population of English Canada rose swiftly toward parity with the French. In 1792, Simcoe took it upon himself to abolish slavery in Upper Canada, 42 years before this was done in the British Empire, and 71 years before the United States. It was an admirable and pioneering endeavour in the principal area of civil rights controversy in North America in the coming century.

Unfortunately, as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars unfolded, the British could not resist the temptation to employ their mastery of the high seas to impose blockades and harass the shipping of neutral powers. The young United States did not have the military force to deter such treatment, and in 1812 those countries went to war. Canada was the blameless focal point of most of the fighting. Canada with the continuing solidarity of the French-Canadians, was able to mount a very solid defense. The many thousands of recently arrived Americans did not support the United States and the generous policy of enticing settlement from the United States was completely vindicated. There were pressures to expel them, monitor them, disqualify them from holding local offices and positions. But it was soon agreed that they could become citizens after eight years of residency. This affected about 40 percent of English-Canadians and this must count as another very successful chapter in Canada’s early record of respect for civil and human rights.

As reasonably successful wars do, considerable national sentiment was created and encouraged by the successful joint struggle to avoid American occupation. Out of these experiences came increased ambitions for democratic self-rule in domestic matters as the British and Americans enjoyed, instead of autocratic rule by British governors. Canada’s position was complicated by the fact that it could not agitate for home rule too energetically or the British would lose patience and sell Canada to the United States for cash or other territory or for a comprehensive alliance. Outright rebellion was not an option for Canada as it had been for the Americans, as the United States would seize Canada if it were not under British protection.

The Canadian solution for agitating but not completely exasperating Great Britain was the Gilbert and Sullivan rebellions of 1837 led by William Lyon Mackenzie in Ontario and Louis-Joseph Papineau in Québec. The Ontario uprising was just a rowdy group of malcontents who became disorderly and were easily chased off, and the French-Canadian group were essentially pamphleteers, though there were some exchanges of fire and small rebel and military units marched to and fro in poor winter weather. A total of about 300 people died, there were 14 executions and 92 people were transported as prisoners to Australia. The rebel leaders fled but were eventually pardoned and returned.

There was enough commotion to get Britain’s attention, but the loyalty of most of the population gratified the British, and they determined to put things right. London sent the well-known reformer Lord Durham to Canada in 1840 to make recommendations. After a year of research by a couple of biased examiners, Durham came to the insane conclusion that the source of Canadian discontent was that the French-Canadians wanted to be relieved of the intolerable burden of being French. Durham proposed uniting Upper and Lower Canada and assumed that the slight resulting English majority would assimilate the French in about 10 years. Of course, this was precisely what the French feared, and the English-Canadians had no desire for it either. But after several years of rearguard action by British governors, the movement for autonomous government succeeded, after the 25-year-old Queen Victoria sent Lord Elgin to Canada as governor to give the Canadians what they wanted. Elgin and Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine achieved this and secularized a great deal of territory owned by the principal churches so that they could be more easily settled and made the principal universities officially nondenominational. These were again great and non-violent steps in the civil rights of Canadians who now numbered over two million people.

All of North America was now walking on eggshells over the immense problem of American slavery. Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834. In practice, there had not ever been more than a couple of hundred slaves in Canada, apart from the natives enslaving each other. Slaves had been imported to the southern states because of their efficiency at harvesting tropical crops such as cotton, so Canada was effectively spared that horrible institution, because of its climate more than its virtue. Canada consistently had a fine record in accepting about 40,000 fugitive slaves that reached the Canadian border in the thirty years before the U.S. Civil War. The leading American anti-slavery advocates Harriet Tubman and John Brown, and Josiah Henson, the model for the chief character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold an unheard-of two million copies in the 1850s, all lived in Canada for years. There were at least 11 black Canadian doctors who were fugitive slaves or sons of fugitive slaves who served in the Union Army in the Civil War, and the white Canadian anti-slavery activist, Dr. Alexander Ross, at the request of President Lincoln, assisted in breaking up a Confederate spy ring in Montréal. Escaped slave Joseph Taper, of St. Catharine’s, wrote this letter back to his former and still putative owner in 1839: “I now take this opportunity to inform you that I’m in a land of liberty, in good health … In the Queen’s dominions, man is as God intended he should be; all are born free and equal, not like the southern laws, which put man on a level with brutes. All the coloured population is supplied with schools. My boy Edward, who will be six years next January, is now reading and I intend keeping him at school until he becomes a good scholar. My wife and self are sitting by a good comfortable fire, happy, knowing that there are none to molest us or make us afraid. God save Queen Victoria.”

As many as 40,000 Canadian volunteers served in the Union Army in the Civil War and Canada was thanked on several occasions by President Lincoln for infiltrating Confederate exile organizations. This was an issue in which all Canadians were united and is a legitimate matter of national pride.

The next major civil rights challenge that Canada had to face was that of the Métis — the mixed white and indigenous people on the Great Plains of Canada. The territory of the natives had been steadily reduced by white settlement and the nutritious content of their diet had been reduced by the heavy depletion of the herds of plains Buffalo. There were also many other grievances and undoubtedly a number of violations of the Indian treaties and of the Indian Act and a flamboyant Metis lawyer, Louis Riel, led an uprising on the western plains in 1878. This was eventually suppressed with little violence, as Prime Minister John A. Macdonald dispatched an adequate military force under Field Marshal Garnet Wolseley, Gilbert and Sullivan’s “very model of the modern major general”. Riel fled to the U.S. and the Canadian government made a number of useful concessions to the aggrieved natives. But in 1885, Riel returned and led a rebellion in northwest Saskatchewan. At the same time, the Canadian Pacific Railway ran out of money and was about to flounder into bankruptcy. Macdonald brilliantly sent Canadian forces West on the railway and they surprised and defeated the insurgents and captured Riel. By emphasizing the railway’s role in saving the country (as Riel was making both annexationist and secessionist noises), Macdonald won passage of a bill to finance completion of the railway. Macdonald also gave the natives the right to vote and rewarded his allies among the native leaders. However, he created a lasting grievance by allowing the execution of Riel. Although 15 people died in the uprising, he should have commuted the sentence for insanity — Louis Riel was delusional.

Conrad Black, “Canada’s excellent history of civil and human rights”, New English Review, 2022-08-18.

November 6, 2022

The ArriveCAN farce as the poster child for Canada’s vastly diminished state capacity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter considers the expensive, ineffective ArriveCAN app the government tried to impose on international travellers as a symptom of Canada’s decreasing state capacity:

There is perhaps no clearer poster child for the current crisis of state capacity than the ArriveCAN app, which was a bad policy initiative, poorly implemented, at great cost, and whose ultimate effect was not to keep Canadians safe and healthy, but rather to annoy users and generate a great deal of hostility towards the government.

The question of state capacity (or more frequently, its absence) became an issue of popular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic when governments, both in Canada and elsewhere, struggled to accomplish basic tasks of pandemic management. Whether it was sourcing enough PPE for the health-care system, scaling up testing or contact tracing, securing the borders, properly staffing long-term-care facilities, taking care of temporary foreign workers, and so on … the authorities struggled to get their act together. This is a well-documented story.

But this all came at a time when we had already started a national conversation about whether Canada had become a place where it was impossible for government to get anything done. Pipelines were the big issue, but we seemed to have turned into a country where crumbling infrastructure and slow and ineffective public services had become simply accepted as a fact of life. “State capacity” just put a name to something that had been in the air for a long while.

And so the pandemic served to both exacerbate and accelerate the concern over state capacity, for two main reasons. First, it raised the stakes. Before the pandemic, the failure of state capacity manifested itself as a slow-motion and genteel sort of generalized decline. With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became a matter of life and death. But second, the gusher of money the government printed during the pandemic helped put a point on the problem: the problem didn’t originate in a lack of funds. Indeed, what transpired during the pandemic was a bit of a spin on the old Woody Allen joke about the restaurant with terrible food and such small portions: There was so much government, and so much of it was bad.

So what is state capacity anyway? And why is it so important?

As I’ve said many times, the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything. More government is worse government … and I’m not even being a pedantic libertarian here, I’m talking objectively about the outcomes of pretty much every new government action.

October 12, 2022

Medically assisted suicide in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Common Sense, Rupa Subramanya discusses how quickly MAID (Medical Assistance in Death) became a commonality in Canada:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS in severe pain. The argument for helping them die is clear: Death is imminent. Why should they be forced to suffer?

In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible. In this respect, Canada was hardly alone: The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide. So do ten states in the U.S.

In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064 — accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year.

There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died. In 2017, only 34 MAiD deaths were in the 18- to 45-year-old category. In 2018, that figure rose to at least 49. In 2019, it was 103; in 2020, 118; and in 2021, 139.

Today, thousands of people who could live for many years are applying — successfully — to kill themselves.

Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent. Progressive Vancouver Island is unofficially known as the “assisted-death capital of the world”, doctors told me.

Why the dramatic increase? Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable”. This included applicants like Margaret Marsilla’s son, Kiano.

In 2023, those numbers are almost certain to rise.

Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors”. According to Canada’s Department of Justice, parents are generally “entitled to make treatment decisions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.” (The federal government does not define “mature”, nor does it specify who determines whether one is mature. On top of that, the doctrine varies from one province to another.)

Dr. Dawn Davies, a palliative care physician who supported MAiD when it was first conceived, said she had “tons of worries” about where this might lead. She could imagine kids with personality disorders or other mental health issues saying they wanted to die. “Some of them will mean it, some of them won’t,” she said. “And we won’t necessarily be able to discern who is who.”

Hugh Scher, an attorney advising Margaret Marsilla, told me: “While other countries have explored extending assisted suicide to minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent. Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, having already removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

August 19, 2022

Why Quebec rejected the American Revolution

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Conrad Black outlines the journey of the French colony of New France through the British conquest to the (amazing to the Americans) decision to stay under British control rather than join the breakaway American colonies in 1776:

Civil rights were not a burning issue when Canada was primarily the French colony of New France. The purpose of New France was entirely commercial and essentially based upon the fur trade until Jean Talon created industries that made New France self-sufficient. And to raise the population he imported 1,000 nubile young French women, and today approximately seven million French Canadians and Franco-Americans are descended from them. Only at this point, about 75 years after it was founded, did New France develop a rudimentary legal and judicial framework.

Eighty years later, when the British captured Québec City and Montréal in the Seven Years’ War, a gentle form of British military rule ensued. A small English-speaking population arose, chiefly composed of commercial sharpers from the American colonies claiming to be performing a useful service but, in fact, exploiting the French Canadians. Colonel James Murray became the first English civil governor of Québec in 1764. A Royal proclamation had foreseen an assembly to govern Québec, but this was complicated by the fact that at the time British law excluded any Roman Catholic from voting for or being a member of any such assembly, and accordingly the approximately 500 English-speaking merchants in Québec demanded an assembly since they would be the sole members of it. Murray liked the French Canadians and despised the American interlopers as scoundrels. He wrote: “In general they are the most immoral collection of men I ever knew.” He described the French of Québec as: “a frugal, industrious, moral race of men who (greatly appreciate) the mild treatment they have received from the King’s officers”. Instead of facilitating creation of an assembly that would just be a group of émigré New England hustlers and plunderers, Murray created a governor’s council which functioned as a sort of legislature and packed it with his supporters, and sympathizers of the French Canadians.

The greedy American merchants of Montréal and Québec had enough influence with the board of trade in London, a cabinet office, to have Murray recalled in 1766 for his pro-French attitudes. He was a victim of his support for the civil rights of his subjects, but was replaced by a like-minded governor, the very talented Sir Guy Carleton, [later he became] Lord Dorchester. Murray and Carleton had both been close comrades of General Wolfe. […]

The British had doubled their national debt in the Seven Years’ War and the largest expenses were incurred in expelling the French from Canada at the urgent request of the principal American agent in London, Benjamin Franklin. As the Americans were the most prosperous of all British citizens, the British naturally thought it appropriate that the Americans should pay the Stamp Tax that their British cousins were already paying. The French Canadians had no objection to the Stamp Tax, even though it paid for the expulsion of France from Canada.

As Murray and Carleton foresaw, the British were not able to collect that tax from the Americans; British soldiers would be little motivated to fight their American kinfolk, and now that the Americans didn’t have a neighboring French presence to worry them, they could certainly be tempted to revolt and would be very hard to suppress. As Murray and Carleton also foresaw, the only chance the British would have of retaining Canada and preventing the French Canadians from rallying to the Americans would be if the British crown became symbolic in the mind of French Canada with the survival of the French language and culture and religion. Carleton concluded that to retain Québec’s loyalty, Britain would have to make itself the protector of the culture, the religion, and also the civil law of the French Canadians. From what little they had seen of it, the French Canadians much preferred the British to the French criminal law. In pre-revolutionary France there was no doctrine of habeas corpus and the authorities routinely tortured suspects.

In a historically very significant act, Carleton effectively wrote up the assurances that he thought would be necessary to retain the loyalty of the colony. He wanted to recruit French-speaking officials from among the colonists to give them as much self-government as possible while judiciously feeding the population a worrisome specter of assimilation at the hands of a tidal wave of American officials and commercial hustlers in the event of an American takeover of Canada.

After four years of lobbying non-stop in London, Carleton gained adoption of the Québec Act, which contained the guaranties he thought necessary to satisfy French Canada. He returned to a grateful Québec in 1774. The knotty issue of an assembly, which Québec had never had and was not clamoring for, was ducked, and authority was vested in a governor with an executive and legislative Council of 17 to 23 members chosen by the governor.

Conveniently, the liberality accorded the Roman Catholic Church was furiously attacked by the Americans who in their revolutionary Continental Congress reviled it as “a bloodthirsty, idolatrous, and hypocritical creed … a religion which flooded England with blood, and spread hypocrisy, murder, persecution, and revolt into all parts of the world”. The American revolutionaries produced a bombastic summary of what the French-Canadians ought to do and told them that Americans were grievously moved by their degradation, but warned them that if they did not rally to the American colours they would be henceforth regarded as “inveterate enemies”. This incendiary polemic was translated, printed, and posted throughout the former New France, by the Catholic Church and the British government, acting together. The clergy of the province almost unanimously condemned the American agitation as xenophobic and sectarian incitements to hate and needless bloodshed.

Carleton astounded the French-Canadians, who were accustomed to the graft and embezzlement of French governors, by not taking any payment for his service as governor. It was entirely because of the enlightened policy of Murray and Carleton and Carleton’s skill and persistence as a lobbyist in the corridors of Westminster, that the civil and cultural rights of the great majority of Canadians 250 years ago were conserved. The Americans when they did proclaim the revolution in 1775 and officially in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, made the British position in Canada somewhat easier by their virulent hostility to Catholicism, and to the French generally.

August 18, 2022

MAID in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Ben Woodfinden discusses the maple-flavoured slippery slope we’re gaining speed on: what’s known as “Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID)”:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Canada is widely seen as one of the world’s most progressive nations in the world, “leading the way” (depending on where you stand) on a variety of social issues. But in recent months, Canada has been garnering some less than savoury international attention because of the dark side of one of its recent progressive accomplishments, namely the assisted suicide regime that has been created since the Supreme Court struck down prohibitions on assisted suicide in 2015. The tragic situation that has developed in Canada offers a warning to Britain and other countries considering going down a similar path, both to be cautious about opening the assisted suicide floodgates and about empowering judges to decide whether such things should be allowed.

When Canada’s enlightened judicial philsopher kings and queens overturned criminal prohibitions on assisted suicide in Carter v. Canada, they overturned their own precedent. In 1993 a majority of the Supreme Court found that the criminal code provisions that prohibited assisted suicide did not ultimately violate the Canadian Charter. In 2015 the Court changed its mind. The law didn’t change, of course, but the court decided that “the matrix of legislative and social facts” surrounding the case had changed. Thus the interpretation of constitutional rights must change with them.

Plenty of the same people who were outraged that the United States Supreme Court would overturn precedent on seminal abortion decisions, seemingly had no problem with the overturning of precedent in this Canadian case. This is because implicit in the view of rights and judicial review that many progressives hold, is that it is perfectly acceptable to overturn precedent in the name of expanding or establishing some newly discovered right — but once this is done, the debate is settled and there can be no reasonable dissent or change of heart. History, it seems, only marches in one direction.

An important part of the Carter decision, where the court determined that relevant social facts had changed, was essentially a blithe dismissal of exactly what has come to pass in Canada less than a decade after the decision. The court rejected the concern that once assisted suicide was allowed in some rare cases, there would be a “slippery slope” from helping terminally ill people end their lives, to a system in which vulnerable people like the disabled were caught in a euthanising net.

Evidence presented in the case by a medical expert from Belgium that this might be possible, was dismissed by the court because “the permissive regime in Belgium is the product of a very different medico-legal culture”. Unlike those barbaric Belgians, enlightened Canada could avoid sliding down this slippery slope in which safeguards are easily gotten around. They would avoid the creeping expansion of eligibility by setting up a “carefully regulated scheme” that would keep its application narrow and exceptional.

Spoiler: No. No, we didn’t.

July 16, 2022

A viable … conservative … party in Quebec? Isn’t that somewhere in Revelations?

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of a Paul Wells column on the unlikely and certainly unpredicted rise of a conservative party in Quebec, he points out just how ephemeral such parties have been in the past:

My Big Book of Columnists’ Clichés tells me I should call Duhaime the leader of Quebec’s “upstart” Conservative party, but if we’re being accurate here, it hasn’t really upstarted yet. Or maybe it keeps upstarting and then unstarting. Quebec had a Parti conservateur in the 19th and early 20th centuries, under whose banner eight premiers were elected. Maurice Duplessis essentially shut it down in the 1930s when he formed the Union Nationale. There was a Parti conservateur for a minute in the mid-60s, to no great effect. And there’s been a Parti conservateur since 2009.

The latest party’s impact on electoral politics so far has been negligible. It won less than 1.5% of the vote in 2018, the year Legault’s amorphous populist-nationalist Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) swept to power. It’s never elected a member to the National Assembly. For the past year, its only MNA has been a woman who got booted from Legault’s party for, uh, contributing to Duhaime’s.

But things have been getting weird in Quebec this year. An Angus Reid Institute poll last week put Duhaime’s upstart party (see how easy it is?) in second place, well behind Legault’s CAQ but ahead of the historic Liberal and PQ parties and the urban social democrats in Québec Solidaire.

The Quebec Conservatives are, in fact, the leading party among male voters age 18-34 and 35-54. They’re not nearly as competitive among young women or among older voters in general. Duhaime would need his vote to keep growing, and not just a little, to have any chance of winning an election. Frankly he’s likelier to win zero seats, and perhaps likeliest to win somewhere between zero and a dozen.

But the party has already gone from 500 memberships to 60,000 since Duhaime, a former Ottawa political staffer (Bloc Québécois, then Canadian Alliance) and Quebec City talk-radio host, became its leader in 2021. That’s three times as many memberships as the CAQ had when Legault became premier.

Duhaime is working on something, a discourse starkly different from Legault’s and also different, in important ways, from the recent positions of the federal Conservatives. He’s against vaccine restrictions — but he’s been careful not to associate with truck convoy protesters. He’s against Legault’s new French language law, Bill 96. Not because it’s mean to anglophones, although Duhaime is making at least a modest attempt to appeal to conservative anglophone voters, but because the law makes blanket use of the Constitution’s “notwithstanding” clause to sidestep Charter rights. Duhaime says no government should curtail rights so easily. He wants a great big dose of private for-profit health care.

After two years of legislation by order-in-council and intermittent curfews and the most sweeping use of the notwithstanding clause in 40 years, Legault’s Premier-knows-best shtick has opened up room on his libertarian right. Enough room for a solid competitor? Duhaime himself shrugged when I asked him, during a brief chat after the parking-lot scrum.

“We might win this,” he said. “We might get zero seats. On est la ‘wild card’ de la gang.”

June 8, 2022

With the ACLU no longer fit for purpose, FIRE steps up to protect freedom of speech on and off the campus

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Taibbi talks to Nico Perrino about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) moving beyond protecting free speech for university students to protecting those rights for all Americans:

After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving “beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans”.

FIRE was the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, who co-authored the 1999 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. To the modern reader the book reads like a collection of eccentric cases of students and teachers caught up in speech code issues, most (but not all) being conservative.

To take just one of countless nut-bar examples, Kors and Silverglate told the story of a professor in San Bernardino reprimanded for violating sexual harassment policies because, among other things, “he assigns provocative essays such as Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal'”, as the court case later put it. This was apparently the “cannibalism” portion of the accusation that he delved into such subjects as “obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children”.

The book triggered such an overwhelming number of responses from other faculty members and students that the pair decided to set up an organization to defend people who found themselves in tricky speech controversies on campuses. They soon found they had plenty of work and, by 2022, enough of a mandate to expand beyond colleges and universities into America at large. According to FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff, as quoted in a Politico story, the group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values”.

As noted in another story I put out today, FIRE will be doing a lot of stepping into a role semi-vacated by the American Civil Liberties Union. I spoke with Nico Perrino of FIRE, producer and co-director of the excellent documentary about former ACLU chief Ira Glasser (see review here), to ask what the expansion would entail …

June 6, 2022

“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials”

Filed under: Government, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

George Mason, quoted in the title of this post, had a very expansive view of the US militia. Most Americans of the day did not seem to share this view, as Chris Bray explains:

How Congress may have visualized the individual minutemen who would compose the militia of the United States after 1792.
Postcard image of French’s Concord Minuteman statue via Wikimedia Commons.

In the second Militia Act of 1792, Congress defined a uniform militia in all of the states:

    That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia … That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball … and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.

So, by federal law, every military-age white male in the country (except men who were exempted by the states, like clergymen) had to report to the local militia commander to be enrolled in their local company, and had to own a long list of equipment, and had to show up to train with that equipment when ordered.

They mostly didn’t. For decades, states reported their militia enrollment to the War Department, and it sometimes appeared that some states, by trying really hard, sometimes almost made it to something in the neighborhood of half participation. In 1826, the Barbour Board — named after Secretary of War James Barbour — evaluated the unmistakable failure of the federally defined uniform militia, and suggested trying again with a smaller group of select militiamen. The board’s report was universally ignored, because by 1826 the federal government, like, couldn’t even: Everyone knew the model of widely shared militia service had failed.

Historians have usually described the failure of universal white male militia service in the early republic as a top-down policy blunder in which political leaders didn’t try hard enough to make the thing work. But a marginal historian named Chris Bray, in a dissertation that generated no excitement of any kind in academia, argued that the universal white male militia obligation was doomed by something else: widespread irritation and popular resistance. The militia obligation reached into the lives of militiamen in ways they didn’t expect and wouldn’t tolerate, so they stopped showing up.

There are many different ways to tell this story, but let’s do it quickly.

May 6, 2022

“Canadians might not know their constitutional history or even the text of the Charter, but they know in their bones that these orders were unconstitutional”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Long before the Freedom Convoy protests earlier this year, I’d been somewhat skeptical of the value of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — not that I thought it was a bad thing to have a clear enumeration of Canadians’ rights, but in the degree to which those rights could be ignored or abrogated whenever the government found it convenient to do so. The invocation of the Emergencies Act proved that lacking strong and effective absolute rights, the Charter was merely a bit of tissue paper. In The Line, Josh Dehass shows he’s not as cynical as I am about the value of the Charter and provides some history predating the current document:

In a Boston courtroom in 1761, lawyer James Otis Jr. made one of the most consequential legal arguments of all time.

Otis was challenging the legality of “writs of assistance”, a form of general warrant giving unfettered discretion to customs agents to force their way into people’s homes to search for and seize smuggled goods, and to require the “assistance” of bystanders.

“It appears to me (may it please your honours) the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of the constitution, that ever was found in an English law-book,” Otis inveighed.

John Adams later described that day in court as “the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the Child Independence was born. Every Man of an immense crowded Audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take Arms against Writs of Assistants.”

This hard-won right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, affirmed by Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is the reason so many of us felt queasy about the Emergency Economic Measures ordered by the Liberal cabinet under the Emergencies Act in February to quell the trucker protests. Canadians might not know their constitutional history or even the text of the Charter, but they know in their bones that these orders were unconstitutional.

The emergency measures required financial institutions to search their records for customers suspected of “directly or indirectly” engaging in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace”, or “directly or indirectly” using their money to facilitate such protests, and then seize their accounts.

That’s a classic general warrant, a writ of assistance in fact, enlisting banks to help King Trudeau and Queen Freeland hunt down their political enemies without going before a judge to prove reasonable grounds that a specific offence had been committed by a specific person. Section 8 is designed to keep us secure against unreasonable searches and seizures by the executive, and the only way for individuals to maintain this security is by requiring specific warrants from an independent judiciary, barring exigent circumstances.

This profound assault on our section 8 right will hopefully be raised during Justice Paul Rouleau’s inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, despite Trudeau’s attempt to focus the inquiry on the truckers themselves. Even if section 8 doesn’t get examined during the inquiry, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association expects to raise it in Federal Court if they’re successful in convincing a judge to review the decision to declare the protests a national emergency.

I don’t expect anything useful to come out of this inquiry process, otherwise Trudeau wouldn’t have let it get started in the first place.

April 4, 2022

QotD: Freedom

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A man is not free because he’s permitted to vote for his political masters. The subjects of the late, unlamented Soviet Union enjoyed that “right”. So did the subjects of Saddam Hussein.

A man is not free because some portion of his earnings is still his to spend on a variety of attractive goods. Not if the government can punish him for choosing goods it has not approved.

A man is not free because the long arm of the law has not yet descended on his neck. That’s more properly called a stay of execution.

A man is free if, and only if, he has the unchallenged right to do as he damned well pleases with his life, his property, and with any other responsible, consenting adult, provided only that he respects the equal freedom of all other men.

Francis W. Porretto, “No Law Abridging”, Eternity Road, 2004-09-13.

March 16, 2022

Canada’s rejection of the rules of a “free and democratic society” under Justin Trudeau

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

We’re now a month past the day that marked when Justin Trudeau’s government stopped even paying lip service to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as Madeline Weld points out:

It is noteworthy that in the aforementioned Munk Debate in which the leaders of the three major national parties – Conservative, Liberal, and NDP – butted heads, that Trudeau declared in praising the legacy of his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau:

    First and foremost is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has defined Canada as a country that stands up for individual rights, even against governments who want to take those away.

Fast forward to 2021, and those rights are no more. When it comes to getting vaccinated for Covid, it’s get the jab or get lost. Far from standing up for individual rights, Justin Trudeau’s government is snatching them away and redefining them as privileges that the government will deign to give back once a person has obeyed its edict and gotten jabbed. In August of that year, he announced that his government, if re-elected, would spend a billion dollars to help provinces create their own vaccine passports for domestic use. Trudeau also said he wouldn’t force anyone to get a Covid shot but would restrict the “privileges” of those who refuse to get one without a medical reason (which is so narrowly defined as to make it almost impossible to get an exemption). So, per Trudeau, people were free to “choose” to get the jab or lose their “privileges” of holding a job and earning a living, going to “non-essential” venues like restaurants, gyms, and theatres, and traveling on planes, trains or cruise ships. No “force” to see here, folks, move along.

So much for “standing up for individual rights, even against governments who want to take those away.” The current government’s edicts on forced vaccination violate the right to “security of the person” as defined under Section 7 of the Charter and the concept of “informed consent” as understood both in Canadian law and the United Nations’ Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Code was created following the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officials who conducted medical experiments on prisoners. Given that the current vaccines, employing a novel technology of mRNA encased in lipid nanoparticles or DNA carried in an adenovirus, are being used only under emergency Interim Orders, people who have them injected into their bodies, whether willingly or for fear of losing their newly defined “privileges” of holding a job, earning a living, and participating in society, are indeed participating in a medical experiment. But regardless of the state of development of the vaccines, no one should be subjected to a medical treatment they don’t want.

Trudeau did not hide his contempt for the unvaccinated during his election campaign of 2021. In a campaign speech on September 1st, he referred to a nearby group of protesters as “anti-vaxxers”. Emphasizing the importance of vaccine passports, he said the federal government would pay for “the development of those privileges that you get once you get vaccinated”. “Everyone needs to get vaccinated, and THOSE PEOPLE,” he said, turning around and pointing at the demonstrators, “are putting us all at risk.” (“The science” – to use the current phrase – concerning Covid infections does not bear him out, but that’s another discussion.) Trudeau then contemptuously refers to his Conservative opponent Erin O’Toole as “siding with THEM” as he pointed backward with his thumb. He dismisses O’Toole’s expressed concerns about “personal choice”. “What about my choice to keep my kids safe?” He berates O’Toole, “You need to condemn those people; you need to correct them.”

Had Harper referred to terrorists or terrorist wannabes as “THOSE PEOPLE” during that Munk Debate in 2015 and said they needed to be condemned and corrected, Trudeau would no doubt have given him an earful. In fact, Trudeau is remarkably reluctant to condemn terrorists. Following the beheading of Paris school teacher Samuel Paty by a Muslim incensed that Paty had shown the Danish Mohammad cartoons in his class while discussing free speech, Trudeau said, “We will always defend freedom of expression … But freedom of expression is not without limits … In a pluralist, diverse and respectful society like ours, we owe it to ourselves to be aware of the impact of our words, of our actions on others, particularly these communities and populations who still experience a great deal of discrimination.” He said not a word about needing to “condemn” and “correct” people who kill when they’ve been offended.

But when it comes to expressing his opinions about those who decline to be injected with an experimental mRNA or DNA product, Trudeau does not seem much concerned about the impact of his words on others. For example, on a French-language TV program in September 2021, Trudeau claims that many vaccine-decliners are racist and misogynist and wonders if they should even be tolerated. Such was his diatribe that People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier tweeted a video titled “Psychopathe fasciste” (fascist psychopath).

H/T to Robert at SDA for the link.

Update: Doh! Forgot to provide the URL for Robert’s post.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress