“A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense has really become very uncommon. Straightforward ideas appear strange and unfamiliar, and any thought that does not follow the conventional curve or twist, is supposed to be a sort of joke.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly November 2, 1933 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

In my latest Epoch Times column I say that now that Trump has somehow forced our chattering classes to realize we should promote prosperity and resilience through markets not impoverish and divide ourselves with trendy schemes for yet more state intervention, the easy first steps are sweeping away interprovincial trade barriers, agricultural marketing schemes and protectionism in the banking, airline and telecommunications sector, and radically simplifying the tax code.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplored the fact that the uniform Canadian response to Trump’s tariff threats has been to plunge with bellicose stupidity to his intellectual and policy level and embrace the very protectionism we claim to despise.

“There is one aspect of the idea of human equality which is almost entirely ignored in the modern world. In fact it is flatly contradicted in the modern world. We hear quite enough perhaps of the essential identity of men in all varieties of place. We hear almost nothing of the essential identity of men in all varieties of time. Yet it is just as indispensable a part of the democratic sentiment to feel at one with men in other periods as to feel at one with men in other lands. The man who despises the dark races is despising Man. The man who despises the Dark Ages is also despising Man.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Jan. 12, 1906, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the persistent interest of federal authorities in requiring us to show identity papers on demand reveals that whatever it is that our politicians claim to love out Canada it certainly isn’t our true legacy of liberty.

“What we ought to consider is this: not that certain ideals are impossible, but that they are undesirable.”

G.K. Chesterton in “A Critic in Utopia” in Middlesex Gazette December 22, 1906, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

“To call this a tendentious reading is to pour more soup than the bowl can hold. Mischievous or adolescent seem a little nearer the mark.”

Rex Murphy in Globe & Mail April 7, 2007 [re a Samson-as-suicide bomber version of Handel’s oratorio]

The historical approach to English Literature “has been destroyed at Cambridge and is now being destroyed at Oxford too. This is done by a compact, well-organized group of whom [F.R.] Leavis is the head. It now has a stranglehold on the schools as well as the universities (and the High Brow press). It is too open and avowed to be called a plot. It is much more like a political party – or Inquisition. Leavis himself is something (in the long run) more fatal than a villain. He is a perfectly sincere, disinterested, fearless, ruthless fanatic. I am sure he would, if necessary, die for his critical principles: I am afraid he might also kill for them. Ultimately, a pathological type – unhappy, intense, mirthless. Incapable of conversation: dead silence or prolonged, passionate, and often irrelevant, monologue are his only two lines.”

A letter from C.S. Lewis to J.B. Priestley on September 18, 1962, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis