Posts in Government
Words Worth Noting - September 6, 2025

“Philip, by the grace of God king of the French, to Boniface who acts as though he were pope, little or no greeting. Let your great fatuity know that in temporalities we are subject to no-one…”

Philip IV “the Fair” of France responding to a letter from Pope Boniface VIII rebuking the king for appointing clerics without regard to papal wishes, a letter that was conspicuously burned, quoted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300

Carney's enemies inside his own head

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.

Words Worth Noting - August 27, 2025

“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]

Government of the expert, by the expert, for the expert

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.

Words Worth Noting - August 21, 2025

“‘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