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
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the trendy ritual elite “land acknowledgements” that Canada is an illegitimate settler-colonial land-stealing oppressive patriarchal nightmare are socially destructive, hypocritical and false.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the Bank of Canada’s one feasible and important job is to control inflation and it should not fall into the old Keynesian ditch and try to manage the economy instead or as well.
“We are so rooted in open and systematic morbidities, in inhuman prejudices, in respectable monomanias, that a sane man terrifies us all like a lunatic.”
G.K. Chesterton “Robert Louis Stevenson” in A Handful of Authors quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“Canada will eventually fall off the fence...”
One of mine, from February 9, 2003 [specifically about our government dithering on the Iraq war but it applies far more widely].
“The greatest blessings we receive in life are undeserved. For example, I didn’t do anything to deserve good parents. On the other hand, it is not unjust for a person to have such a blessing, and it is not an act of justice to try to erase it. What justice requires is gratitude for blessings received. What charity requires is trying to act in a way that blessings of the same kind may be more widely enjoyed.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that the City of Ottawa’s increasingly restrictive garbage policies underline that politicians and bureaucrats think the rest of us are distasteful refuse.